Berber Whiskey

Before I travel somewhere new, I generally like to research the history, culture, sights and customs of wherever I happen to be heading. I say generally because despite making 15 trips to Las Vegas in the last 14 years, I still don't understand the history of that place; just never looked into it.

Vegas is my mulligan, if you will. 

So when I decided to spend three days in Marrakech this past spring, I turned to my trusty Lonely Planet guide and the whole entire internet to make sure I was prepared. Well prepared. Visiting Morocco, in all honesty, could have kind of freaked me out so I made doubly sure before I left Madrid to fly south to Marrakech that I had swotted up properly on the place so there would be absolutely no missteps.

Of all the Moroccan customs I was dreading, one of the scariest for me was drinking mint tea. Not the language, not getting lost in the souks, not being in the ethnic and religious minority or the lack of available sanitary public toilet facilities. Mint tea. Call me crazy here and you'd be completely and totally within your rights because there's nothing especially scary about it at all. It doesn't have mysterious hallucinogens or some other sort of drug like super powerful caffeine in it. It's just tea brewed with mint in it. Like a whole ton of mint.

Don't get it yet? I'm not surprised. Let me explain. Every guide book I read, be it on the internet or in good old fashioned paper form, described mint tea as the symbol of Moroccan hospitality. I guess it's sort of like pineapple in the United States, although I rarely get offered actual pineapples when visiting someone, which is regrettable. I was afraid I would encounter this stuff everywhere and that I just wouldn't like it and I would be faced with the choice between offending a host in a country which I didn't fully understand and drinking a liquid that I didn't particularly care for.

What's wrong with mint tea, you ask? Well as it turned out, nothing. But if there are two things that don't exist in my life, it's mint and hot drinks. Crazy, right? I know. But almost every drink I take in life is cold. I'm usually naturally hot (think insulating layer of blubber here) and I just never drink heated beverages. I make an exception sometimes for Irish coffee (hot) and red wine and bourbon (room temperature) but come on, all those drinks have alcohol in them, something I was confident I wasn't getting in my mint tea in muslim Morocco. I just can't stand mint and Americans seem to be obsessed with the stuff. For me, mint is good for dental products and gum. That's it. Nothing else.

So it's about an hour after I arrive in country and I'm faced with my first glass of mint tea (shown above) and I'm not looking forward to it. The tea is definitely hot and the teapot is jam packed full of mint leaves (believe me, I checked). The cookies look great (they were) but the tea, maybe not so much. The manager of our hotel, Ishmael, described the tea as "Berber whiskey" and poured the drink in what seems to be the traditional style, raising the pot as the glass is filled, causing an herb-y head on the tea. OK, so that's pretty cool. I can get behind a drink cheekily referred to as whiskey which has a beer like head on it served in what looks like an oversized shot glass.

And as it turned out, the tea was pretty darned good. I actually had it for breakfast every morning in our hotel by request. Mint tea, thankfully, is really not that minty or tea-y. It's sort of nicely in the middle of the two. It doesn't taste like gum or dental products and with a lot (and I do mean a lot) of sugar, it's nicely palatable. And to my relief, I guess, I didn't get offered it everywhere I went. I didn't find too much beer (best drink ever!) in Morocco but I'd still rather be offered water than tea if a cold brew isn't available. 

I will forever after refer to mint tea as Berber whiskey. I'll never get that phrase out of my head. And I like that, much like I'll every so often refer to donkeys as "Berber taxis". Mint tea was part of my Moroccan experience. If you ever go, have a glass of Berber whiskey for me.