Stevia
A Paraguayan shrub whose leaves are intensely sweet, used by Guaraní communities to sweeten yerba mate long before the refined extract became an industrial product. The whole leaf and the white extract are quite different things and only one of them tastes of the plant.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Stevia rebaudiana
- Family
- Asteraceae
- Part used
- Leaf
- Origin
- The Paraguay-Brazil borderlands
- Drunk in
- Paraguay, Southern Brazil, Japan, China
Character
Very sweet with a green, slightly bitter tail that the refined extract removes and the leaf does not. A single leaf sweetens a cup and two make it taste of the plant.
Notes: hay, liquorice, green
History
Used by the Guaraní to sweeten mate and documented by European botanists in the 1880s. Japan commercialised leaf-based sweetening in the 1970s and the refined steviol glycoside industry followed decades later, by which point most cultivation had moved to China.
How it is drunk
Added to mate in Paraguay and southern Brazil, and grown as a garden plant in much of South America. Elsewhere it is met almost entirely as a refined white powder in soft drinks rather than as a leaf.
Production
Leaves are stripped and dried quickly, and the sweetness survives drying well. The refined extract is a multi-step industrial isolation and shares only its origin with the dried leaf.
Preparation
Infusion · Blended with tea
Herbal infusion (tisane)
1–2 g/100 ml · 90–95 °C · 5 min
Category-typical practice rather than a measurement for this specific botanical. Most infusions are far more tolerant of a long steep than tea is.
What gets confused
Dried leaf and refined glycoside extract are sold under the same name and behave completely differently. The leaf carries flavour; the extract is engineered not to.
Common mistakes
- Using it by the spoonful as you would sugar. A pinch of leaf is already a lot.
Related botanicals
- Liquorice root — The two sweet botanicals, and both carry a distinctive tail that ordinary sugar does not.
Teas this connects to
- Sencha — The Guaraní sweetened mate with it long before the extract industry existed, and the whole leaf sweetens any infusion the same way.
Comparisons
- Stevia vs liquorice root — The two sweet botanicals, and both carry a distinctive tail that ordinary sugar does not. One is a Paraguayan leaf and the other a Eurasian root, and they sweeten very differently.
Guides
Evidence for this page
The botanical name, family and distribution above are checked against an external authority. Stevia rebaudiana (Bertoni) Bertoni — GRIN-Global Taxonomy record— retrieved and read, not countersigned by a named human. That source covers naming and distribution only. Everything else on this page — history, culture, production, flavour, preparation and buying advice — is TeaHQ’s own synthesis with no external source behind it.
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 Stevia 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.