The Quest for the Tea

One of the things i loved about Morocco is the Tea. To a thought junkie like me, any drink that you can use as an excuse to sit down, read and ponder, is a drink that is worth drinking. Whether it was on the balcony overlooking a small parking lot in Meknes, or the cafes that flourish all over that odd country, the tea was seldom a disappointment. It was a useful replacement for coffee, something i have been known to overdue, and it was one tradition i hoped to bring home with me. Unfortunately, this task proved more difficult than i thought.

Having grown up in a tea drinking family, i thought the process of making this beverage at home would be rather easy. I had already gotten a good approximation on how to make it in Morocco, and had produced some very good pots of it already. The tea is called Mint Tea, and it made by brewing a really dark tea while adding a handful of green mint sprigs and quite a bit of sugar. You then pour the tea into a cup, and pour that cup back into the pot to mix it.

The first two problems I run into are ingredients. The tea that i used in Morocco wasn't labeled in English, and it came in pellets made of rolled up leaves. I assumed that finding similar tea would be easy in America, but it turns out that it is actually kind of hard to find tea that isn't sold in tea bags. Green Mint sprigs was also something that is kind of hard to come by. Fortunately, my parents had planted mint in the garden this summer, so all i had to find is the tea.

The first break i had in locating the tea came with a random trawl on Wikipedia. I find out that mint tea isn't a very exact term, and that the type of tea that we drank in Morocco was also called Tuareg Tea. The actually type of tea leave used are a really dark green tea called Gunpowder Tea, named this because the round pellets resemble gunpowder pellets.

This revelation brings its own problems. The first is that there is still no loose leaf teas that i can find for a reasonable price, and the second is that all the green teas in America avoid being dark. So my search continues for a dark green tea, and a way to get this tea at a coffee shop. Maybe someday America will turn away from its large light teas, and embrace a multicultural approach to serving tea.