MOROCCAN MINT

“East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” Rudyard Kipling wrote in The Ballad of East and West. One possibility is that Kipling never set foot in the Kingdom of Morocco. Some people thought of Morocco as the centre of the globe before Europeans discovered the Americas. location: just underneath Spain. Just over the Strait of Gibraltar, in Morocco, is a country that has long acted as a cultural and commercial bridge between the East and the West. King Hassan II, monarch of Morocco since 1999, often likens his kingdom to a desert palm tree that is “rooted in Africa, nourished by Islam, and rustled by European winds,” despite the fact that Morocco’s role as a commercial centre has declined somewhat in the previous hundred years or so. Perhaps the clearest example of this constitution in practise may be seen in the Moroccan custom of making and serving strong mint tea.

Tea is often thought to have been brought to Morocco by Europeans, notably the English. Nobody knows for sure, but it was possibly British businesses in China who brought the first cargo of tea to the country. Because Muslims across the world already had a tradition of drinking a drink flavoured with mint leaves cultivated locally, it was an instant popularity with that community. It was quickly realised that the mint beverage, which was heavy and abrasive, mellowed down the tea, making it much more pleasant, therefore the British tea was deemed to be a wonderful fit for their way of life. It was a fruitful meeting of East and West in that sense.

We’re happy to provide you with Moroccan Madness tea, the ideal replacement for a visit to a tea shop in Marrakech. The Moroccans have a saying that tea should be as bitter as death, sweet as honey as life, and smooth as love. We think we’ve managed to capture that in this cup by combining the best of Sri Lankan and Indian teas with mint from Washington State, considered by many to be the best mint in the world. Savour the tastes of cultures meeting for the first time!