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 different gourd shapes and how it affects your mountain of mate.
Creating and maintaining your mountain of mate is a feat every matero wants to achieve. Not only is it aesthetically pleasing, but it also keeps the mate’s duration and strength at an even level.
However, most materos have trouble maintaining this mountain of mate.
But this isn’t always the fault of the drinker, rather, the gourd.
Gourds with a sleek surface such as glass, ceramic, and steel, don’t provide enough texture/roughness to keep the leaves together. So when you go prepare your mate, you’ll notice the leaves are able to easily slide around.
This doesn’t happen with wood or calabash gourds though.
And these gourds don’t have a smooth interior. The texture inside these gourds is more rough, grainy, and bumpy, allowing it to hold on to the leaves, providing stability to the mountain.
Although this is all good news, you still need to take into account the shape of these gourds.
Despite wood gourds – carob and palo santo – being great at holding up the mountain, their shape and size don’t always allow for the best-looking mountain of mate. Most palo santo gourds are too small and too narrow, while carob gourds have a widened rim that disconnects some of the yerba from the actual mountain.
I’ve always created the best mountains of mate with calabash gourds. These gourds have to be medium-to-large in size and have a nice sized opening no smaller than 2 inches. Any smaller than that and you won’t have a mountain, but a hill.
So if you’re looking for a gourd that fits this description, I’d highly recommend our Wide-Mouthed Calabash Gourds.
Hope this helped!
See you next week on Mate Monday!
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