Little Red Cup teas are nearly all single varieties — straightforward, unmodified, one thing being itself. We don't carry Cantaloup Hibiscus Rose Surprise or anything in that neighborhood. The only slight exceptions until now have been Jasmine, which is traditional and enormously popular in China, and Russian Caravan, which is a blend of three Chinese teas and also very traditional.
So a blend is a bit of a departure for us. We've just made one anyway: Moroccan Mint, equal parts our Organic Gunpowder Green and organic spearmint. Which means I owe you an explanation of what the stuff actually is.
The drink
Moroccan mint tea — atay in Moroccan Darija — is green tea, mint, and sugar. That's it. But the proportions are where it gets interesting, because the traditional version is not a subtle drink. It is a drink of excess: both bitter and highly sweet, at the same time, on purpose.
The traditional method goes something like this. Boil gunpowder green tea — not steep, boil — for a quarter of an hour. What comes out is astonishingly strong and astonishingly bitter. Then add spearmint, fresh and dried both, and enough sugar to make a scalding-hot brew drinkable. Serve it in small glasses, poured from a great height.
We've had tea in Morocco. We once tried it without sugar, and immediately requested sugar.
Where it came from (and the story everybody tells)
Here's the version you'll find on more or less every tea website, ours included until recently: gunpowder green first arrived in Morocco during the Crimean War, when British merchants found the Baltic blockaded, ended up with ships full of green tea and nowhere to put it, and offloaded the lot at Tangier and Mogador.
It's a good story. A real war, a real blockade, a tidy mechanism. I've told it myself.
It also appears to be made up. There is one proper history of this — Graham Cornwell's Sweetening the Pot: A History of Tea and Sugar in Morocco, 1850–1960 — and he went looking for where the story came from. His finding: "none of the authors who put forward this Crimean War thesis offer any evidence or cite any source to backup their claim." Everybody repeats it. Nobody can say who started it.
Here's what the record actually shows, and I think it's the better story.
Tea turned up in Morocco around the turn of the eighteenth century, when Queen Anne sent a box of it to Sultan Moulay Ismail — possibly to help spring some English captives. The court took to it and worked it into their ceremonies. And there it sat for roughly a hundred and fifty years: a rare, expensive curiosity of the Sharifian court, "inaccessible and probably even unknown to most Moroccans." The reason was tax. Duty ran 3.25 francs a kilo, so a merchant could pay half the value of the tea just to land it on the dock.
What changed wasn't a war. It was a treaty. Britain's minister in Tangier, Sir John Drummond Hay, spent the better part of a decade leaning on the Sultan, and in 1856 he got a trade agreement that cut duties to 10% and swept away the royal monopolies. The floor fell out of the price, and the country drank. Tea landing at Mogador multiplied twenty-five times over between 1857 and the end of the century — while the value of it went up only eight times. That gap is the price collapsing.
So does the Crimean War figure at all? Yes — sideways, and through wheat. The war meant Britain needed cereals to feed its troops, Moroccan grain exports hit their highest level in decades in 1856, and the trade balance between the two countries shifted accordingly. If the war had anything to do with Morocco taking up tea, that's the route: Morocco earning British money selling grain, not Britain dumping tea it couldn't sell.
A tax cut and a wheat boom is admittedly less romantic than blockaded ships. It has the advantage of being what happened.
Why it had to be gunpowder
Because it travels. Gunpowder tea is rolled into tight little pellets — that's where the English name comes from, they look like black powder grains — and rolling the leaf that way means far less surface area exposed to air and moisture. Less staleness. Less damage in the hold of a ship. For a tea that had to survive a long sea voyage and then an overland journey before anyone was going to drink it, that's not a small advantage.
It also holds its ground. Gunpowder is assertive and slightly smoky, and it needs to be, because it's about to be buried under a great deal of mint and rather more sugar. A delicate tea would simply vanish.
The name came through the translation intact, incidentally. In Morocco the tea is barūd — which is just the Arabic word for gunpowder. The better grade is lamkarkab, "the rolled." And a Moroccan drinker in the 1800s would have described the brew as yellow with a hint of red, and slightly sweet — which is more or less exactly what still comes out of the pot. Some things travel well.
Our Gunpowder comes from Jiangxi Province, grown organically by a worker-owned cooperative, and we leave it in an open-leaf format rather than rolling it into pellets. The pellet form solved a shipping problem from the 1800s. We have better boxes now.
The mint
The mint in Moroccan tea is naʿnāʿ — nana mint. For a long time I assumed this was some distinct North African species. It isn't. It's spearmint: specifically a curly-leaved cultivar of it, Mentha spicata var. crispa 'Moroccan', with bright green crinkled leaves and a clear, sweet, uncomplicated mint flavor. Ordinary spearmint, bred into a particular shape.
Which is convenient, because it means the mint half of this is not exotic or unobtainable. Ours is organic and grown in the USA.
The pouring, and the three glasses
The tea gets poured from about a foot above the glass, and there are two reasons for that. The first is foam — the rghwa, the little crown of bubbles on top, which is the mark of a properly made pot. The second is manners: a high pour is a visible gesture of respect toward your guest. Pouring low is a way of saying you don't much care.
You'll also read that the height "oxidizes the tea" or "releases the tannins" and cuts the bitterness. I looked for someone who could actually support that and came up empty. A few seconds of falling through the air isn't doing much to your catechins. The foam is real and the courtesy is real; the chemistry is, I think, a story we tell afterward to explain a thing we were going to do anyway.
Then there's the saying about the three glasses — the first as bitter as life, the second as strong as love, the third as soothing as death. Except that half the sources have it the other way round, with the first gentle and the third bitter, and no one can tell you where it started or who said it. It's oral tradition. A good one. Just don't let anyone sell it to you as history.
About the sugar
The sugar isn't decoration and it isn't a modern corruption — it arrived alongside the tea, came in through Essaouira as conical loaves, and got broken up at the table with an ornate copper hammer. During the famines of the 1880s sweetened tea did real work as an emergency source of calories. It's woven into the thing.
And the traditional quantities are not shy. Most authentic recipes land around three tablespoons per quart, which if you're used to Western tea is going to read as a typo. It isn't.
There's a reason it needs all that sugar, and it's the boiling. Green tea boiled for fifteen minutes isn't merely strong. Prolonged high heat doesn't just extract more of everything — it chemically converts the catechins, the epi forms flipping into non-epi isomers, while tannins and caffeine keep pouring out of the leaf. One study of green tea brewing found that infusions left going for thirty and forty-five minutes scored miserably with tasters "due to the bitter taste and dark colour." Fifteen minutes at a rolling boil is well down that road. You end up with something that genuinely requires a heap of sugar to be drinkable — so a heap of sugar is what you add.
How we make ours
Our blend skips the ordeal. It's equal parts Organic Gunpowder Green and organic dried spearmint, and it's built to be brewed the way most of us actually make tea:
180°F water, 2 minutes 30 seconds, 2 teaspoons (1.5 g) per 8 oz cup.
It comes out a dark gold, very minty, with plenty of body — a cup that doesn't require sweetening but will happily accept it. The leaves will take a re-steep. Brew it light and it drinks nearly like an herbal tea, which makes it a good afternoon and evening cup. It does have caffeine — it's real green tea — but less than a straight green, since half the blend is mint. (We get into the details in our caffeine in tea guide.)
It's also excellent iced. I make iced tea stronger than I'd drink it hot, on the grounds that a great deal of ice is about to turn up and dilute the whole enterprise.
And if you want the full Marrakesh experience: brew it stronger, add heaping spoonfuls of sugar, and serve it scalding hot in a small glass. Add fresh mint on top if you have it. Pour from as high as your nerve allows.
The traditional recipe, if you'd rather do it properly
Should you want the real, unabridged, bitter-and-sweet article, here's the method — and for this one you want plain Gunpowder Green rather than our blend, since you'll be adding your own mint:
- In a saucepan, combine 4 teaspoons of Gunpowder Green with a quart of water and simmer for 15 minutes.
- Strain.
- Return to the pan with 3 tablespoons of white sugar and about 10 sprigs of fresh spearmint.
- Bring back to a boil.
- Pour from a height, into small glasses.
It is a project. It's also genuinely worth doing once, if only to understand why the sugar is not optional.
Either way — whether you take the fifteen-minute route or just put two spoonfuls of our blend in a pot for two and a half minutes — you're drinking something with a couple of centuries behind it, that traveled a very long way to get here.
Mike
Common questions
What is Moroccan mint tea made of?
Three things: green tea, mint, and sugar. The green tea is gunpowder, a Chinese style rolled into tight pellets; the mint is nana mint, a curly-leaved spearmint cultivar; and the sugar is used in quantities that surprise most Western drinkers — around three tablespoons per quart in traditional recipes.
Is Moroccan mint tea caffeinated?
Yes. It's built on real green tea, so it contains caffeine — it isn't an herbal infusion. A blend that's half mint will have less caffeine than a straight green tea, and brewing it lighter reduces it further.
Why is Moroccan tea poured from so high?
Two reasons. It builds the foam crown (rghwa) that marks a well-made pot, and a high pour is a gesture of respect to a guest. The common claim that the height oxidizes the tea and reduces bitterness isn't supported by any food-science source we could find.
Did gunpowder tea really arrive in Morocco because of the Crimean War?
No. Historian Graham Cornwell found that no one making the Crimean War claim cites any source for it. Tea reached the Moroccan court around 1700 but stayed a rare, heavily taxed luxury for 150 years. What actually opened the floodgates was the 1856 Anglo-Moroccan trade treaty, which cut import duties to 10%. The war's real connection was grain, not tea: Britain needed cereals for its troops, so Moroccan exports and buying power rose.
Is nana mint different from spearmint?
No — nana mint is spearmint. It's a specific curly-leaved cultivar, Mentha spicata var. crispa 'Moroccan', rather than a separate species.
Do you have to add sugar to Moroccan mint tea?
For the traditional preparation, effectively yes — boiling gunpowder green for 15 minutes produces something genuinely bitter, and the sugar makes it drinkable. Our blend is brewed normally rather than boiled, so it doesn't need sweetening, though it takes it well.
