My favorite drink is Maté. I love the taste and the effect, hot using the traditionnal calabash and bombilla, but mostly cold, sparkling. The effects are really making great on me, giving energy boost, memory, focus, sports and happyness, without the side effects on the heart that I got with the coffee. I finaly drink maté, nearly everyday. But commercial, cold and sparkling maté brands, such as Club Maté are expansives. Slightly more than 6€/litter. There's different tastes, but not that much. I drink 4 differents : the original, cola, grenade, and winter edition (with winter spices). I like drinking it hot as well, but the preparation isn't very convenient and take time to make, and wait for it to cold a little bit so I can drink it. For those two options, it's also very difficult to actualy find maté in shops. There's only specific grocery stores that sells this kind of stuff. For example, in my city, there's only one shop that is selling Club Maté, and no shop at all selling just regular maté for infusion. So I got a very simple idea: make my own cold maté. I started by listing and finding bigger online shop that sells maté. I found one out of 6 or 7 shops I found, that is selling a wide variety of maté (actualy, more than 50 references) from different brand, all coming from south america, and that is selling kilograms instead of just 500 grams packages. The project for now is very simple: testing different recipes of maté, take notes on the preparation, the effects, the taste etc... and select what seems the best for me. I prepare multiple 1L bottles, with each a different recipe, and then pour it into 500ml Club Maté's recycled glass bottles with a screw cap. Obviously, it's way cheaper. I get the maté around 17€/kg, I use 20g of leafs for 1 little of water, so in one killogram, I get 50L of brewing, so 0,34€/L. And I can have any kind of tastes possible, with a better quality. Here's some different combinations: - Using different maté, I bought 3 for now. Some are regular, bio, other are augmented with differents ingredients, such as guarana or fruits essences - Doses of maté. I use a specific spoon for this. (10g of maté in that spoon) - Infusion type: cold or hot - For hot infusion, the temperature: my tea kettle can make 60°, 70°, 80°, 90° or boiling water. - Still or sparkling water - Infusion time (in hours, or days) - Reinfusion count: how many time do you recycle the leafs. When drinking maté in calabash, I put the leaf in it in the morning and drink three infusions with the same leaf. As I infuse more, the energic effects are less important throughout the day, so I can sleep! It changes the power of effects, but also the taste. - Adding differents things in the water to infuse with the leafs: spices and fruits for example.