Welcome to Mate Monday – a weekly series where every Monday, I share with you a quick tip to enhance your overall yerba mate drinking experience and knowledge. If you have a tip of your own, submit it here and you may be featured on our next post!
Now let’s begin…
Today’s Mate Monday is about an alternative way to make a mountain of mate. Specifically, when the opening of the gourd is too big.
A prime example of this is with Brazilian cuias.
These gourds are naturally narrow at the bottom and flare out at the top.
Other examples may include certain carob gourds, glass gourds, and calabash gourds.
When you prepare these gourds, you’ll quickly realize you have a problem… You can’t cover the opening with your palm and perform the infamous upside-down shake to form your mountain of mate.
So what can you do?
One way around this is to cover the gourd with a larger flat surface such as a plate, coaster, or even a book. Press it firmly against the gourd and follow the usual steps.
However, if you don’t have anything lying around to use, you can still use your palm. But instead of trying to cover the entire gourd, cover half. Now just shake the leaves until they all lay on one half of the gourd and against your palm. Be careful not to shake too hard or the leaves will fall out. For extra measure, you can also use your bombilla with your other hand to move the yerba to where it needs to be.
Doing this method will skip the step of shaking it upside-down, but that step isn’t actually all that necessary as long as you have a high-quality bombilla.
So if you, unfortunately, have a gourd that’s too big for your palm, try preparing it as I mentioned.
Hope this helped!
See you next week on Mate Monday!
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