Guarana
The seed of an Amazonian climbing vine, and one of the small number of botanicals outside tea, coffee and the Ilex species that contains caffeine. In Brazil it is simultaneously a Sateré-Mawé cultural staple prepared by grating a smoked stick into water and the flavour base of a national soft drink.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Paullinia cupana
- Family
- Sapindaceae
- Part used
- Seed
- Origin
- The Amazon basin, particularly the Maués region of Amazonas state, Brazil; also grown in Bahia and in Venezuela
- Drunk in
- Amazonas, Maués, Bahia, Brazil
Character
Bitter, dry and faintly chocolatey, with smoke from the curing rather than from the seed. The soft drink tastes of guarana the way cola tastes of kola, which is to say partly and at some distance.
Notes: cocoa, smoke, dry wood, roasted nut
History
The Sateré-Mawé are the people who domesticated the vine and the Maués region remains the reference origin for the traditional product. The industrial history is entirely separate and much shorter: Brazilian soft drinks built on guaraná date from the early twentieth century and made a regional Amazonian crop into a national flavour.
How it is drunk
The Sateré-Mawé preparation is a hard smoked bastão of ground seed grated into water against the rough tongue of the pirarucu fish — a specific practice with specific implements, not a picturesque description. Industrially, guaraná is a soft-drink flavour and a powder sold in Brazilian markets and pharmacies. It is very rarely infused loose in the way most of this catalogue is.
Production
The fruit is picked when the red capsule splits to show a black seed in a white aril — the eye that gives the plant its popular name. Seeds are washed, roasted, husked and ground, and the traditional product is then rolled into hard sticks and smoked over hardwood for weeks, which is what allows it to keep in a humid climate without spoiling.
Preparation
Cold infusion · Decoction
Boiling and decoction
1–3 g/100 ml · 98–100 °C · 10 min
Caffeine: The seed contains caffeine and is unusually caffeine-dense for a plant material. TeaHQ publishes no figure: reported values vary widely with the cultivar, with whether the material is seed, powder or extract, and with the preparation, and no single number would honestly represent any of them.
What gets confused
Most guarana sold outside Brazil is a powdered or standardised extract for the drinks and supplement trades rather than the seed itself, and the two are different materials with different flavours. “Brazilian cocoa” is an old trade name and the plant is not related to cacao.
Common mistakes
- Treating the extract powder and the traditional grated stick as the same product. They taste nothing alike.
Evidence for this page
This page is TeaHQ synthesis throughout. No external source stands behind any statement on it, including the botanical name. 132 of the 204 botanicals have had their names and distribution checked against a taxonomic authority and this is not one of them.
Brewing parameters here are typical practice for the category rather than measurements of this plant, and each set says so.
This page makes no safety claim. It describes what Guarana is, where it comes from and how it is prepared — not what it does to a person. The absence of a safety note here is not a statement that the plant is safe. How TeaHQ handles this.