Staples, not remedies
Some botanical drinks are drunk in enormous quantity as an everyday beverage, in the way that tea and coffee are. Yerba mate in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and southern Brazil; barley tea across Japan, Korea and China; rooibos in South Africa; hibiscus as karkade in Egypt and bissap across West Africa; chrysanthemum in southern China. Each is a daily drink inside its own culture, with its own vessels, its own customs and in several cases its own social rules.
Mate is the clearest case
Yerba mate is prepared in a gourd with a filtered straw and is characteristically shared: one gourd, one straw, refilled and passed around a group in a fixed order by a designated server. The practice carries genuine social meaning, and describing mate purely as a caffeinated herbal infusion misses most of what it is. It also, unlike almost everything else on a herbal shelf, contains a substantial amount of caffeine.
Why this framing matters for a catalogue
A Western herbal range presents these as interchangeable wellness products, sorted by what they are supposedly for. That framing is a commercial convention and it travels badly: it turns a staple into a remedy and strips the practice from the plant. TeaHQ’s approach is the same one applied to gongfu cha — describe the practice, attribute it to the communities it belongs to, and be explicit that the description is compiled from outside rather than offered as an authoritative account.
The limitation, stated plainly
This category is defined by cultural role, which is a matter of record rather than of evidence. Nothing here asserts anything about what these drinks do. Where a plant carries safety considerations — mate’s caffeine content is the obvious one — those belong on the botanical record with its sources, not on a category page.