Maués

The stick is the point. A bastão of pressed guaraná gets wetted and rubbed against a palm-sized stone, or these days against the dried tongue of a pirarucu, until a fine mud collects and dissolves into a gourd of water. Maués sits on the Maués-Açu in Amazonas and is the largest single producer of guaraná in the country; the drink that comes out of the gourd is çapó, and it passes hand to hand with the oldest served first.

In the Sateré-Mawé origin story the plant and the people begin in the same act. Uniawasap plants the left eye of her murdered son and gets guaranarana, the false guaraná; she plants the right eye and gets the true one, then revives the boy as the first Sateré-Mawé. They domesticated the wild vine, or as they themselves prefer to put it, semi-domesticated it, and in 2020 they became the first indigenous people in Brazil granted a Geographical Indication, issued as a Denominação de Origem covering waraná and the pão de waraná; Maués holds a separate indication of its own from 2018. Growers here let the harvest ferment two or three days before roasting, and only in a clay oven, a habit one of them says is now more or less Maués alone, and the picking itself runs from about November to March. None of this is recent: a colonial official was reporting in the 1770s that the Maués were famous for making the drink and that it had already reached Europe.