Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on April 2012

The favored tea of Argentina, Uruguay, parts of Chile and Brazil, and a few other lands besides, mate (pronounced “ma-tay”) has been given a Japanization by the Coca Cola company. Instead of soaking the ground leaves in a gourd and sucking the infusion through a metal straw with a little sieve on the end (true story) you can now imbibe your Taiyo no Matecha (¥147) from a plastic bottle with a color scheme more Peruvian than anything else. The only problem? It doesn’t taste anything like the real stuff. But most of you will probably never know.