Mate gets you moving
The best thing you can say about fish is that it doesn't taste like fish at all. Do you know what else doesn't taste like fish? Pizza! But today isn't about pizza. It's about Club Mate – a cult iced tea drink that stands out because it doesn't taste like tea at all (if your Club Mate tastes like fish: switch brands).
Club Mate's advertising slogan is: "You get used to it." Brilliant! I like that understatement. It sounds like: "Club Mate - it's okay when there's nothing else." Or: "Club Mate - thirst makes you drink it."
Club Mate (along with Paulaner Spezi) has long been the preferred drink of young people in my circle. It's a carbonated soft drink made from the tea leaves of the South American mate shrub, from which indigenous peoples have been producing their slightly bitter but stimulating "mate tea" for centuries.
The western version originated in the "Sekt-Bronte" based on mate, which a beverage merchant named G. Latteyer encountered at an exhibition in Dietenhofen, Bavaria, in the early 20th century and immediately licensed.
His daughter then married a Mr. Sauernheimer in 1957. He, in turn, sold the license in 1994 to the Loscher brewery in Münchsteinach, Middle Franconia, due to his age. There, after only 80 years, they quite rightly realized that "Bronte" wasn't a suitable name for a beverage. "Bronte"? It sounds like a chummy Brontosaurus with a mustache and a runny nose ("Hey Bronte? How's it going up there?"). So they renamed the niche soft drink "Club Mate." And it's been a success ever since.
This stuff has been used as a "hacker's drink" since the nineties and kept entire LAN parties gaming all night long because it contains a pretty high amount of caffeine. The caffeine content is around 20 milligrams per 100 milliliters, twice as high as Coca-Cola. Club Mate is available seasonally in various flavors, including "Pomegranate," "Berry," "Mate Cola," a "Winter Edition," and "Ice Tea Fuel" with even more caffeine.
The company advertises its "fuel" with a slogan that stubbornly defies every short-lived advertising trend: "This stuff really gives you the drive you need." Brilliant! Who among us doesn't dream of a drink that really gives us the drive we need? New Club-Mate flavors are in the works. I'd love to see, for example, "Mate Peach-Porcini-Toffifee," "Mate Pear-Ginger-Aperol," and of course, "Mate Tomato."
Club Mate fits perfectly into our mindful present, as it is simultaneously vegan, vegetarian, lactose-free, gluten-free, alcohol-free, asbestos-free, lead-free, dioxin-free, and plutonium-free. All properties that, incidentally, also apply to tap water (but not to fish).
Unlike cold coffee, iced tea has long since shed its staid image as a youth hostel emergency ration and is now a shelf-seamless success as iced tea, especially in peach and lemon flavors. The recipe for success: simply stir sugar and chemicals into your tea until it no longer tastes like tea, but rather like Hubba Bubbas dissolved in nitric acid.
I wonder why this shouldn't work with cold coffee too? It's probably a brilliant idea. It's just that with my terrible marketing skills, I can't seem to push it properly onto the global market, so I have to keep writing columns here until I collapse from exhaustion. Or drink a Club Mate. Or eat a Toffifee. That – personally tested for you – also has a goal-oriented and stimulating effect, at least on me. Have a nice weekend!
rnd
