Lapacho
The inner bark of a South American flowering tree, simmered in northern Argentina, Paraguay and southern Brazil and sold across Europe as lapacho. A genus revision moved the tree from Tabebuia to Handroanthus, which is why both binomials remain in circulation and why suppliers disagree with each other on labels.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Handroanthus impetiginosus
- Family
- Bignoniaceae
- Part used
- Bark
- Origin
- From northern Mexico south to northern Argentina; the drinking tradition belongs to Argentina, Paraguay and southern Brazil
- Drunk in
- Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia
Character
Woody and faintly sweet with a bitter astringent finish and very little aroma — a light-bodied brown decoction that tastes more of the pot than of the plant if it is under-simmered.
Notes: dry wood, bark, faint vanilla
History
The Portuguese name pau d’arco means bow stick and records the wood’s use for bows — the tree was a timber and a weapon before it was a drink, and it is planted across the region as a flowering street tree today. The European trade in the bark is recent and is supplied largely from Brazil and Paraguay.
How it is drunk
In northern Argentina and Paraguay the inner bark is simmered and drunk domestically. In Europe it is sold as a loose bark under the name lapacho, frequently blended with other material, and it is one of the few South American botanicals in the European trade that is not mate.
Production
Inner bark is stripped in strips from the trunk and dried; only the inner bark is the traded material and outer bark and wood are the common adulterants, both of which give a thinner drink. Harvesting bark from a slow-growing hardwood at commercial scale is a recognised sustainability problem and the supply is not well documented.
Preparation
Decoction
Boiling and decoction
1–3 g/100 ml · 98–100 °C · 15 min
What gets confused
Lapacho, pau d’arco and taheebo are three names for the same material in Spanish, Portuguese and the Japanese-market trade. Several Handroanthus and Tabebuia species are harvested and sold interchangeably, and material sold under one binomial is not reliably that species.
Common mistakes
- Steeping rather than simmering. Bark gives up almost nothing to hot water alone.
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 Lapacho 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.