After a hard day’s gardening I needed a real pick-me-up. I found this bottle of Empower mint to be almost perfect, in that I could have really gone for a 64oz Big Gulp size of it. At first I was very surprised, as mint is not usually a drink that is associated with drinks of any kind, and I picked this up with the expectation of something very different. A mint tea brings to mind a sweet sugary drink that has enough bite to clean your mouth and leave your breath clean. OK, most of my experience with mint has been in candy and gum. Guayaki has gone completely the other way, where the drink gives off a huge natural mint flavor, without being sweet or “minty”

Taste:8
Just as good as the other flavors. It is a wonder taste, like a tea but much more complex and fruitful. On a hot summer day, I would pick this drink over the bottled teas I see in the refrigerated aisle. This is sooo much better than any Snapple, Vitamin Water, or heaven forbid, Brisk Lipton.

Nutrition/Buzz:8
Sweetened with organic sugar and flavored with spearmint, peppermint, rooibos, rose hips, lemon juice and manioc root, this drink has only 76 calories per bottle. Guayaki mate has 140mg of Caffeine ( or matene – see previous yerba mate review for the debate) per bottle, just under what a Monster or Red Bull would have, only about a thousand times better on a hot sweaty day. Also, the sugar content is much lower, so you wont be feeling much, if any, crash from it.

Packaging:7
Nice – not amazing. They list as much info on this as one possibly can, from their nutritive information to the caffeine content to the free music downloads they are giving away, chock full of bits about the rugged workers who drink it to the rugged farmers who deliver it, then slap on every badge from fair trade to the Rabbinically Certified Kosher stamp. There is only so much you can do with an overload of information, and while the designers did the best they could with what they have, most of this stuff could have been saved for the website, and the package could just be used to advertise the drink.

Website: www.guayaki.com 7
GAH! The biggest most comprehensive website I have seen for a drink in a long time! Shopping carts, recipies, award links for the best places to work in 2007, people, restoration and product links, specials and gift certificates, products and testimonials, 2 FAQs – all in all 18 main links to subpages there they grow exponentially. This is truly a fantastic work of documents for a company that puts out a little over half a dozen energy drinks, some big bottles, and loose tea, but somehow they have turned this into an empire of goods, ranging from special Yerba Mate Drinking gourds to stainless steel slurpee straws for drinking it out of said gourd.
They even have their own guayaki music player to promote artists they like. While I love getting info on my energy drinks, this is WAY overkill! But I am guessing the bigger they are, the better chance they have of making a big splash in the market – which according to yet another document on their site, can help bird conservation and agriculture.