How is Moroccan mint tea brewed and poured — and why from so high?

Mint tea — atay — is not a drink in Morocco so much as a language of welcome, and the way it is made is a small performance you will see hundreds of times. It starts with a pinch of gunpowder green tea, so called because the leaves are rolled into tight little pellets. The host puts them in a metal teapot, pours over a splash of boiling water, swirls it and pours that first water away. This rinse washes off bitterness and dust and wakes the leaves up; people are often surprised to see good tea being thrown out, but it is the secret to a clean, sweet brew.

Then the real infusion: boiling water back into the pot, a fat handful of fresh spearmint stuffed in — stalks and all, pressed down so it half-fills the pot — and a frankly heroic amount of sugar, often a broken chunk of sugar-loaf. The pot sits on the heat to come up to a gentle boil and steep. The host tastes and adjusts, sometimes pouring a glass and tipping it back into the pot two or three times to mix the sugar and strength evenly through. It is fussed over, tasted, balanced. Sweet, but behind the sweetness the mint stays bright and the green tea keeps a slight grassy edge.

The pour is the famous flourish, and it is not just for show. The host lifts the pot high — a foot, sometimes much more — and sends a thin amber stream down into a small glass below, raising and lowering the pot like a conductor. That long fall aerates the tea, cools it from scalding to drinkable, and crucially builds a delicate foam crown on top, the keskes, which marks a properly poured glass. A skilled pourer never spills a drop and seems to enjoy the theatre of it; the higher and steadier the stream, the more pride taken.

And it always comes in three. There is a Maghrebi saying that the three glasses are gentle as life, strong as love, and bitter as death — because each successive steeping from the same pot draws out a different character. To refuse all three, or to rush off after one, can be read as a small coldness; to sit and take the full three rounds is to accept someone's hospitality properly. On our journeys I make sure guests are poured tea by an artisan or in a family home and shown how to do the high pour themselves — it is harder than it looks and a joy when you finally get the froth.