When Tyler Gage, co-founder and co-chief executive officer of Runa LLC, left California for South America, he was not planning to build a beverage company. “I originally went down to study indigenous languages in the Amazon,” he explains. “I had a professor in school who worked with these tribes in the Amazon, and I went with him primarily to do linguistic research.”
While working with these Amazonian tribes, Gage experienced his first taste of guayusa, a brewed beverage produced from the leaves of a caffeinated Amazonian holly tree ilex guayusa. “The whole community, particularly the hunters, gets up at 3 in the morning, and they boil these huge clay pots full of guayusa,” he describes. “They sit around the fire, drink guayusa, tell stories, interpret dreams, and do the whole routine. They brewed it like tea, so they would harvest leaves in these big pots and drink it like tea.”