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Necessity is the mother of discovery. This is the story about how a winter storm led to us making our own tea from native Texas trees.
February 2021 Winter Storm
We have lived in Austin a long time and we never had come close to experiencing the type of weather that hit in February of 2021. The lowest temperatures we get in the worst of winter might be 15 degrees (F) in a bad year. And even when that happens, that occurs in the dead of night, and by 10am, the temperature is back up into the 40's. Before this storm, there was only one day I recall where the temperature stayed below freezing during the daytime: even then, that was only just a few degrees below freezing.
Iced trees over roof.
The idea of it getting down to 5 degrees was unheard of. The idea of it staying at 5 degrees during the daylight nearly unthinkable. And the idea that it would stay at 5 degrees for five days straight downright impossible. Yet, this is exactly what happened.
The Texas electric grid collapsed, the Austin water system collapsed: Texas became a third-world country overnight.
Combined with the record breaking cold was a fair bit of snow. It is rare to get any snow in the winter. The snow we do get either melts immediately, or leaves a light dusting that melts by 10am. In this crazy storm, we got near 6 inches of snow.
Officially, they called this Winter Storm Uri, though many liked to refer to it as Snow-mageddon.
Snow on steps by pool.
Snow on deck.
Measing the snow depth.
Shoveled path to water supply.
Austin has very little equipment and ability to deal with ice and snow, and their scant coverage does not come anywhere near neighborhood roads. We had no electric, no water and the road were impassable (just walking on my driveway was treacherous). Though locked in with no modern services, we were still better prepared than most to cope during the week-long event. We had stocked up on drinking water, food and had an 18,000 gallon reserve of water (a.k.a., swimming pool) to use for flushing toilets and other non-drinking uses.
Heavy ice and snow.
Icicles on a tree.
The one thing we did not plan for was an alternative heating source. There was an ice storm three days before the really cold weather moved in and we lost our electric power for a few hours. This made me realize that there was a good chance the infrastructure was at risk with the approaching weather.
It was after this initial ice storm, but before the temperature plummeted that we stocked up on food. This was also when I realized that, though we had a fireplace, we had no wood to burn. The grocery stores were still open and reasonable stocked before the Snow-mageddon, but it was impossible to find firewood. I started to contemplate whether the supply of construction lumber I had in my garage was a candidate.
We sealed up every door crack to retain as much heat as possible. Luckily, after a couple days, we wound up with rolling blackouts, so we would get occasional heat and that would sustain us. The coldest it got inside was about 50 degrees (F).
Where's the Tea?
Front yaupon trees after snow and cold snap.
Sagging yaupon trees after snow and cold snap.
This is supposed to be a story about tea making, so where is the tea? It is shown in the pictures on the right.
Those are Yaupon Holly trees. We have a bunch in our front yard and some in the back. These ones in the front yard had a few branches snap as a result of the ice buildup. Cleaning up after the storm, I had to cut up a few large branches from these Yaupon trees.
The lack of firewood was a storm preparation mistake I would not make again, and these logs seemed to have potential.
However, not every tree makes for good firewood. Some woods burn too quickly or do not burn hot enough. Some woods emit toxic fumes when burned. Does the wood from a Yaupon Holly tree make good firewood? That is the question I researched that led to my tea making adventure.
Yaupon Holly: A Brief History
What my research uncovered:
- Yaupon Holly is a native North American tree.
- It is the only native North America tree whose leaves contain caffeine.
- Its tea was a very common drink and was the main source of caffeine until the British started importing their tea from the Far East.
- The British made a ton of money on imported tea from the Far East
- A British botanist decided to name it Ilex vomitoria, somewhat deliberately to create an association between Yaupon tea and vomiting.
- It is true that Native Americans used Yaupon Holly tea in purification rituals that included vomiting.
- Yaupon Holly tea does not make you vomit.
- It had long been forgotten as a source of caffeine/tea until somewhat recently.
- Making a selling Yaupon Holly tea has now become a boutique business in Texas.
And the answer the original question? Yes, Yaupon Holly also makes for a decent firewood. Good, but not great.
The Experiments
Having learned that you could make caffeinated tea from the tree leaves, I embarked on another research project to find out exactly how to make it. I uncovered a few variations:
- Drying.
- You can let them air dry over the course of a few weeks.
- You can dry them in an oven at 200 degrees (F) for a few hours.
- Roasting.
- Temperature: a saw ranges from 325 to 400 degrees (F).
- Duration: I saw ranges from 15 minute to 30 minutes.
Wanting to be scientific about it, I settled on trying four different combinations to see how the end result would differ. Note that you do not necessarily have to roast them, but I like a blacker tea so did not add the greener version as one of the variations.
Harvesting
Leaves in a strainer for washing.
Leaves in bucket after picking.
You could pick the leaves one at a time from the branches, but that's pretty labor intensive. I would run my closed hand down an entire branch and strip them off this way. It's an imperfect method, but much faster. After a while, your hands get raw though, so gloves help.
You also want to wash the leaves and pick out all the stem bits after that crude harvesting technique.
Drying washed leaves on paper towel.
Many trays of washed leaves.
Tray of cleaned leaves.
Drying
When drying, you need to spread the leaves out well and not have them stack too much on one another. The ones I air dried I let sit for two weeks or so and I would mix them up every so often to get more even exposure to the air. I had also read that when air drying, it can be better to leave them on the branch since it naturally keeps the leaves nice and separated. I read that too late for this batch though.
For the oven-dried variation, I had them at 200 degrees (F) for about 2 or 3 hours (I forgot). You can tell they are dry since they will have started to turn brown. The air dried ones were greener than the oven-dried ones, maybe because I did not let them dry long enough.
Green leaves in tray ready for drying.
Dried leaves.
Trays of dried leaves.
Roasting
I roasted these at 350 degrees (F) with times of 15 and 30 minutes.
Roasted leaves (two types).
Strainers of roasted leaves.
Trays of leaves after roasting.
Grinding
Ground leaves in a tray.
Strainer of hand-crushed roasted leaves.
I used our burr grinder to grind the roasted leaves. The cheaper and more common whirly-bird style grinders are inferior since they generate too much heat and degrade the product. I first had to clean the grinder thoroughly since we normally use it for coffee.
Given the geometry of the burr grinder, it require pre-crushing the leaves to get them to a smaller size. I started with a wooden spoon, but then realized just crushing with my hand was faster and easier.
Packaging and Results
Brewing yaupon tea in cups.
Crude tea cannister labels.
I recycled some tea cannisters from other teas and used sticky notes to label each batch with the experimental parameters. As shown further below, my wife would significantly improve our packaging game the next time around.
Over the course of a few days, I tried all the variations and did not discern much of a difference between any of them. I do not have the most sophisticated palette. I did have a slight preference for roasting longer and drying in the oven saves weeks of time. The next batch I made I just went with this one variation.
Déjà vu
Almost exactly two years after Winter Storm Uri hit in 2021, Winter Storm Mara struck Austin. That past 2021 storm was highly unusual for Austin, but I had seen weather like that before when I lived in the Northeast. This 2023 storm was like nothing I had ever seen. It would also lead to our most massive tea making session ever.
Getting an ice storm in Austin is fairly common, much more common than getting snow. We are at just the right latitude where it flirts with freezing temperatures a lot in the winter, so all it takes is for that to co-occur with some precipitation. However, two things combined to make Winter Storm Mara a most unusual event:
- We had an ice storm for 3 days in a row.
- The temperature never rose above freezing during the day.
Accumulating ice on tree limbs
The result was a constant accumulation of ice on the trees over a three day period. Each passing day, the trees drooped lower and lower, if they could. Many branches snapped and there were many trees and limbs that fell. Early in the storm, one limb took out our Internet cable. Later, a large branch not only took out our electric line, but also pulled down the riser pole which was bolted to the house. Anything that could be impacted by a falling tree limb was damaged: roof, gutters, cars, fences, outdoor furniture, etc.
Thicker ice accumulation.
Drooping trees on roof.
Car damage.
Fence damage.
Backyard full of limbs and damage.
But the worst was to come when everything started to thaw. The morning after the three day storm, it was bright, sunny and the temperature was rising quickly. It seemed like a good time to start the cleanup process. After 10 minutes outside, we had to come back in.
Far more tree limbs were broken off than had fallen to the ground. The slow ice build up was serving as glue holding broken limbs in place. As they thawed, they gave way. For a few hour period, at a rate of about one a minute, you would hear a loud cracking sound and then would see a large branch falling. It was deadly to be outside under any trees. Our yard, like all in our neighborhood, has plenty of trees.
Limb-lined streets.
The tree damage across all Austin was significant: millions of tree lost. Our neighborhood having so many trees, and having the heaviest ice build up, was the worst in the city (and maybe all of Texas). News crews used pictures and videos from our neighborhood for their maximal damage, sensational needs.
Every single home for a few mile radius had the same issues with many of lost trees and tons of broken branches. They started calling this storm Arbor-mageddon. In the days afterwards, the streets were lined with the wreckage and it was a wall of 6 foot high piles of branches on both sides of the street, down every street. It would take the city 3 months to pick it all up.
Yaupon Holly Tree Damage
Broken yaupon trees after ice storm.
Front yaupon trees after ice storm.
Every single tree on my property (about 20 of them) had some form of damage. The Yaupon Holly trees were no exception. We lost 2 of them outright and the others were in varying damage conditions. This gave us far more leaves than we could hope to turn into tea, but we did manage to use a significant amount of them.
Tea Making in Bulk
Leaves in various stages of processing.
This time around I showed my wife how to make the tea and she did most of the work. I helped some with the harvesting and provided the direction, but she did all the labor.
There was one experiment we tried this time that we previously could not. Some of the leaves came from a damaged female Yaupon Holly tree. The female trees have little red berries. All the previous trees we used for tea were male trees. I had read that there was supposed to be a difference, but we could not discern any.
The final touches by my wife was to create these incredible labels for the tea cannisters.
Fancy tea cannister labels for the ice storm batch.