It is not tea
Tea is one plant, Camellia sinensis, and there is none of it here. Guayusa is an Amazonian holly, a relative of yerba mate. Horchata is a mixture of flowers and herbs from the Loja highlands. Calling them tea would be convenient and it would be false, so we call them infusions.
Guayusa: the one drunk before dawn
Ilex guayusa grows in the shade of the forest in the Amazon, between three hundred and nine hundred metres. It is not a crop of sun or of altitude: it is an understory plant, and it is harvested leaf by leaf, by hand.
It has caffeine — comparable to coffee's, without the acidity, and the body takes it on more slowly. In Kichwa communities in Napo it is brewed before first light and drunk together while people talk and tell each other what they dreamed. That hour of the morning is, literally, why the plant was planted.
It is sun-dried the same day it is cut. Dried fast it stays green and herbal; dried slowly, or caught by rain, it darkens and loses.
Horchata lojana: twenty plants in a bundle
In the markets of Loja a bundle of fresh flowers and herbs is sold, tied by hand, for a little over a dollar. Boil it, let it stand, and it gives a deep red infusion that looks like nothing else anyone drinks in the country.
The colour is not added: it comes from escancel and ataco, two plants included precisely for that. Around them go cedrón, lemon verbena, chamomile, lemon balm, mallow, mint, rose and whatever else the seller judges right that day.
Because there is no recipe. There is a tradition. An ethnobotanical study in the province recorded 71 species in use, across 33 botanical families, three of them endemic to the Ecuadorian Andes — the widest range documented for a single drink in Ecuador. Two bundles bought from neighbouring stalls on the same day do not contain the same thing.
Horchata is recognised within Ecuador's intangible cultural heritage and is listed in Slow Food's Ark of Taste. Neither of those is a certification: they are recognitions, and we name them as such.
What we are not going to tell you
Almost everything written about horchata is about what it is good for. We are not going to do that, and we would rather explain why.
In Ecuador, a food advertised as having curative properties stops being a food as far as the health authority is concerned and becomes a natural product of medicinal use, with a different registration and different obligations. A shop that puts "good for digestion" under the buy button is selling a medicine without saying so.
So here you will find which plants are in it, where they come from, and who puts them together. What it does for you, you will find out by drinking it — which is how everyone in Loja has found out, for several generations.
How to make them
- Guayusa — a spoonful per cup, hot water just off the boil, five minutes. It survives a short boil without turning bitter.
- Horchata — the bundle in a litre of water, boil for a minute, take it off and cover for ten. Drunk hot, and in Loja with lime and panela to taste.