Guayaki Yerba Mate Energy Drinks

Today for you I shall review the energy supplement lineup from Guayaki, and if I weren’t a web writer I’d be looking for 100% recycled paper to print it on.

Guayaki has an almost frightening commitment to an eco-friendly save the rainforest philosophy, so much that I would only be half surprised to travel to a rainforest and see a Lemur suckling on one of these products.

Matching this commitment is the impressive level of effort put into the dynamic product line.  So go ahead, read on!

Taste

I can proudly say I’ve worked my way through 11 different Guayaki products (1 canned yerba mate, 3 shots, and 7 bottled yerba mates).  The word proudly, however, only finds itself in that sentence because consuming these products instills a feeling of being Mother Nature’s favorite child, not because of superior flavor.

This lineup can be loosely summed up as 20% flavorful, 50% palatable, and 30% disgusting with a universally strong tea/herb influence.  That 20% is made up of Lemon Elation (the closest assemblance of a traditional energy drink in their line) and a couple other fruity flavors, while the 30% is almost exclusively made up of the shots, to which I would prefer a shot of pine-sol.  With every drink you’ll have to arm your taste-buds with a machete to get to a conclusion, just like a real rainforest expedition!

Ingredients

Now, I’m just thinking freely here: if Guayaki’s biggest goal in life is to save the rainforests, aren’t they kind of working backwards by exclusively using organic ingredients?  Maybe the ingredients they used were harvested from other, less deserving forests.

ANYwho, it’d be crazy for me individually sound off the ingredients for each drink, since every drink has its own custom list.  The buzz words on most of these drink’s labels, however, are yerba mate and green tea.  If there’s any one take home message from this company, it’s that yerba mate is their homeboy.  That was lame of me, my apologies.  As for caffeine, everything clocks in at 140mg, except for Lemon Elation which tops out at 150mg.

Effect

As my grandfather would so eloquently put it: “Well I’ll be horse-kicked by a mule,” these energy drinks deliver.  Every single Guayaki product gave me a wholesome, fulfilling, and if you’ll bear with my apparent lack of creativity, organic (read: natural feeling) energy boost.  The drinks never compromised my nervous system, never left me hung over, and were pleasantly consistent.

Verdict

Guayaki has managed to birth a giant happy family of energy drinks while taking admirable strides to slow our destruction of the planet.  Flavors seem well developed (despite end results), ingredient choices look be the result of much thought, energy boosts are better than the average beverage cooler resident, and the work put into the Guayaki image is second-to-none.  In my book, Guayaki has set a new standard for the rising organic energy drink market.

Reviewed by Dusty Smith