Country
Morocco
Morocco does not grow tea and is the largest customer Chinese green tea has. Almost all of it is gunpowder and chunmee out of Zhejiang, bought to a numbered specification rather than by garden, and what happens to it here is not what China does with it: atay, brewed hard with a packed handful of fresh spearmint and a great deal of sugar, poured from arm's length into small glasses. The leaf is Chinese, the drink is Moroccan and neither side would recognise the other's version.
What grows here
The mint, which is not a small thing, because it is the ingredient that cannot be shipped. Nana, the Moroccan spearmint, goes in fresh by the handful, which is why the drink has no packaged form and why the tea trade on its own does not explain it. The leaf comes from Zhejiang, the province that has supplied North Africa's export greens for well over a century, and it arrives under trade grades: gunpowder in codes like 3505 and 9375, plus chunmee. A substantial part of what Morocco imports is not drunk here at all but moves on into Mauritania, Senegal and the Sahel.
How it is made here
The Moroccan method is a decoction rather than a steep, and the leaf is chosen for it. A first small pour of boiling water is thrown away to take off dust and the sharpest edge, then the tea is brewed in a metal berrad with the sugar and the mint in it rather than sweetened afterwards, drawn back and forth between pot and glass to mix, then poured from a height so it lands with a head of foam. That treatment would destroy a delicate green. Gunpowder's tight pellets survive it, keep well in a hot climate and give the strength the sugar and mint are set against.
What to look for
Nothing sold as Moroccan tea grew in Morocco, so the provenance question is a Chinese one: which grade, which crop year and how it was kept. This trade sells to numbers, and within gunpowder a better grade means smaller, harder and more uniform pellets with a green sheen rather than a dull grey. Residues rather than authenticity are the live issue here: ONSSA, Morocco's food safety authority, found Chinese brands on sale over the limits in 2019 and announced new standards for tea imported from China, which changed what Chinese factories make for this market. Dried mint is a different drink.
How it got here
The story usually told has British merchants dumping Baltic-bound tea at Moroccan ports during the Crimean War and creating the habit overnight. The dates do not support it. Tea came in through European trade in the eighteenth century. Sultan Slimane, who reigned until 1822, already kept a court official whose office was tea, and the English traveller James Richardson described a full Moroccan tea ceremony in the 1840s. Sugar and tea landed at Essaouira and moved inland through Jewish merchant networks. The nineteenth century changed the scale rather than the fact, and by the early twentieth century mint tea was universal.