Yerba maté is the best drink for creative and technical work. Not because of a marketing claim but because of how it has been used for centuries by writers, artists and thinkers who needed to stay in the zone through a long afternoon.
It is not coffee, although we still drink that too. It is not a nootropic stack or a mushroom elixir. It is a plant that the Guarani people of South America called the drink of the gods, and it has been fuelling long, focused afternoons ever since.
The UK is only now catching up. Here is why it works.
The Problem With Coffee and Creative Work
Coffee is brilliant for a standing start. A sharp, fast hit of caffeine that cuts through the fog of a slow morning. For that job, nothing beats it.
But creative work rarely happens in the morning. Or rather, the work that requires genuine creative thinking — the writing, the ideation, the making of things — often needs more than a morning. It needs the afternoon too. The evening. The hours after the day job ends when the project you actually care about is waiting for you.
That is where coffee starts to work against you.
By the third coffee of the day the caffeine has done something different. Instead of focus you get a low hum of anxiety. Instead of clarity you get scattered attention. The very thing you reached for to help you think ends up making thinking harder.
We noticed this ourselves. One of us writes a Substack about art — the market, the collectors, the artists worth knowing about. A weekly piece that requires genuine concentration and a particular kind of calm attention. The sort of thinking that cannot be rushed or jittered into existence.
Coffee would not get us there by 7pm. Maté does.
What Makes Yerba Maté Different for Creative Work
The science behind this is the same science we wrote about in our piece on flow state. Yerba maté contains caffeine — around 96mg per can of Matelo, similar to a strong coffee. But it also contains theobromine, a natural compound also found in cacao that works alongside caffeine rather than amplifying it.
The result is what maté drinkers describe as calm alertness. Focused and present without the edge. The kind of mental state that lets you sit with a thought long enough to develop it rather than jumping to the next one.
For creative work specifically this distinction matters enormously. Creativity does not respond well to urgency. The best ideas arrive in a state of relaxed attention — when the nervous system is engaged but not pressured. Maté creates that state more reliably than coffee does, particularly in the second half of the day.
The Kind of Creative Work That Needs This
Not all creative work is the same. Some of it benefits from the sharp, urgent energy of coffee — the deadline piece, the fast brief, the thing that needs to be done now.
But there is another kind. The work you do because you care about it. The side project that has been waiting all week for Saturday morning. The essay that keeps getting pushed to next week. The thing you started two years ago and keep meaning to finish.
This is the creative work that needs a different kind of fuel. Patient, sustained, calm. The sort that lets you stay in a piece of writing long enough to find what it is really about. The sort that keeps you at a desk at 8pm not because you have to be but because you want to be.
That is the 5-9 after the 9-5. And that is what we built Matelo for.
Why It Is Not What You Think
Most people expecting a recommendation for the best drink for creative work are expecting something unusual. A nootropic stack. A mushroom elixir. Something complicated and expensive that promises cognitive enhancement.
Yerba maté is none of those things. It is a plant that has been shared between people for centuries. It is what Argentine writers have been drinking while they work for generations. It is what passed between friends in the afternoon in Buenos Aires while we watched and wondered why nobody had brought it properly to the UK.
The best drink for creative work is not complicated. It is not new. It just needed someone to put it in a can.
How We Use It
One can of Matelo at the start of an evening session. Not as a ritual or a productivity hack. Just as a drink that happens to deliver the right kind of energy at the right time.
The writing session that follows is better than the one fuelled by a late coffee. Calmer, more sustained, less likely to end in a distracted scroll through the internet at 9pm when the caffeine spike wears off.
We are not claiming maté makes you a better writer or a better artist. We are saying it gets out of the way and lets the work happen. Which is really all any drink can do.
If you want to understand more about why yerba maté delivers energy differently from coffee, our Learn page has the science behind it. And if you are ready to try it for yourself, you know where to find us.