The Monk of Mokha

by Dave Eggers

Treasure Island Middle School. It almost sounded romantic. Treasure Island itself was bizarre, an inexplicable man-made mass of contradictions. The navy built it in 1936, sinking 287,000 tons of rock and 50,000 cubic yards of topsoil into San Francisco Bay, just off of a natural island called Yerba Buena and between San Francisco and the East Bay. The island, a military base through World War II, wasn’t called Treasure Island then. The name came afterward, when it was decommissioned and the powers that be, hoping to convert it to commercial use, named it after a book about murderous pirates.

Hamood had a thousand proverbs and maxims. His favorite was Keep the money in your hand, never in your heart. He used that one a lot. “What does that mean?” Mokhtar asked. “It means that money is ephemeral, moving from person to person,” Hamood said. “It’s a tool. Don’t let it get into your heart or your soul.”

wanted the car loaded with extras, and they liked to finance. Either way the price could be massaged. There were four boxes—total price, interest rate, monthly payments and down payment—and you could toggle each one till you got the price you needed. But first was the offer, the base number, and how that number was delivered was everything. Make an offer and shut up, Li said. You make the offer and whoever speaks first loses, you got that? Whoever fucking talks next loses. Mokhtar would say a number, $32,500, and stare at the customer sitting on the other side of the desk. Just stare. Nothing bizarre—he wasn’t trying to hypnotize anyone. But you had to be confident in that number. The number was the number. It was the best number you could do. And always the customer would speak first. Always. You let that fucker talk first, you hear me? Whoever fucking talks first loses.

The fuel never made a profit—no gas station can turn much of a profit on actual gas—but it brought people into the grocery, and

that’s where the profits happened. Food, lottery tickets, liquor.

Sitr had known Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. She’d known Nagi Daifullah, a Yemeni American farmworker and a martyr to the farmworkers’ cause. When Cesar Chavez began to organize farmworkers, the Yemenis in the Central Valley lined up behind him. In 1973, Daifullah, a Yemeni from Ibb, became a United Farm Workers’ strike captain. Fluent in English and Spanish, he was a crucial link between the Spanish- and Arabic-speaking laborers. In August that year, at the height of the UFW battles with the farm owners and law enforcement, Daifullah was outside a bar, celebrating a modest union victory. A Kern County police officer approached, and he and Daifullah had words. He beat Daifullah over the head with a flashlight and dragged him through the street, killing him. Chavez himself led the funeral procession, seven thousand farmworkers strong, through Delano.

Ethiopians chewed the beans and made weak tea from them, but it was Ali Ibn Omar al-Shadhili, a Sufi holy man living in Mokha, who first brewed the bean into a semblance of what we now recognize as coffee—then known as qahwa. He and his fellow Sufi monks used the beverage in their ceremonies celebrating God, which lasted long into the night. The coffee helped bring them to a kind of religious ecstasy, and because the Sufis were travelers, they brought coffee to all corners of North Africa and the Middle East.

MOKHTAR WAS GRATEFUL TO Miriam and thanked her by boring her, and Justin and Jeremy and his family on Treasure Island, with daily breathless updates about his plans to become a coffee importer.

Islam allows a follower to self-declare adherence to the faith, to become a Muslim by personal commitment, without any formal ceremony, so one day he declared himself a Muslim and spent his first Ramadan at Burger King.

to make the United States the world’s leading coffee consumer. By the twenty-first century, Americans were consuming 25 percent of the world’s coffee, and by 2014 coffee was one of the most valuable agricultural products in the world, a seventy-billion-dollar business, with the cherries grown in Colombia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Kenya, Uganda, Guatemala, Mexico, Hawaii, Jamaica and Ethiopia.

good coffee should be roasted gently, in small batches, and lightly. A dark roast hid the greatness of a coffee, or steamrolled it, much like burning a steak would ruin a good cut of meat. Roasted coffee had more than eight hundred different aroma and taste components, and bringing out any respectable amount of these required the skill of an artisan. Mokhtar watched the Blue Bottle roasters do this, and

And it all lasted a few minutes. The average roast only took ten minutes, and every second was crucial. Periodically, in the middle of a roast, the roaster would remove a few beans, checking the color, the size, the cracks. It was an intense few minutes, and as often as not, the roaster, even after all that, would think he or she could have done it better. Ideally, the roasted beans then were allowed to rest. They reach their flavor peak three days after roasting, and after seven, they begin to decline. Grinding the coffee three days after roasting is ideal, and it’s best to brew it immediately after grinding.

Any given cup of coffee, then, might have been touched by twenty hands, from farm to cup, yet these cups only cost two or three dollars. Even a four-dollar cup was miraculous, given how many people were involved, and how much individual human attention and expertise was lavished on the beans dissolved in that four-dollar cup. So much human attention and expertise, in fact, that even at four dollars a cup, chances were some person—or many people, or hundreds of people—along the line were being taken, underpaid, exploited.

He became familiar with the drinks, exotic twenty years ago, now standard. There was an espresso, which contained basically the same amount of beans as a cup of coffee, but finely ground and concentrated in a much smaller amount of water. There was a café au lait, half coffee and half steamed milk. There was a macchiato, a double shot of espresso topped with foam. There were the drinks borrowed from or based on drinks popular abroad. The espresso romano was a shot of espresso with a slice of lemon served on the side, not to be confused with the guillermo, one or two shots of espresso poured over slices of lime. Algeria gave the world the mazagran, a cold coffee drink made with coffee and ice, and sometimes rum or sugar or lemon, served in a tall glass. There were various coffees with cheese—cheese dunked in a cup of hot coffee and later eaten when the mixture softly congealed. In the Spanish-speaking world, there was guarapo con queso, made with Gouda or Edam. Among the Swedes it was called kaffeost and employed the Finnish cheese leipäjuusto. There was iced coffee and cold-brew coffee. There was Thailand’s black tie—a mixture of black tea (chilled), sugar, and condensed milk, crushed tamarind, star anise, orange-blossom water, and a double shot of espresso. There was Irish coffee (with whiskey), English coffee (with gin), and calypso coffee (with Kahlúa and rum). In Senegal there was café touba, where the beans were mixed with selim and other spices during roasting, and s...

Being a Q grader is something akin to what a sommelier is to wine, a grand master is to chess. Like so much of third-wave concentration on quality and expertise, the Q-grading program was very new, established in 2004. Ten years later, there were still only two thousand Q graders in the world. And Willem was correct: among those two thousand, not one was an Arab. This seemed like the kind of obvious challenge that Mokhtar was meant to overcome. A vision gripped him, of returning to Yemen, arriving in Sana’a and striding through the country as the world’s first Arab Q grader. An important man.

When Mokhtar arrived in May of 2014, the Marxists were long gone, but intertribal warring in Yemen was again in full swing. Historically, Yemen, when not being invaded or colonized by outside powers, from the Ottomans to the British, was fighting itself. It wasn’t until 1990 that Yemen had become the Arabian Peninsula’s first multiparty parliamentary democracy. In 1993, elections were held, and in 1999, Field Marshal Ali Abdullah Saleh was elected president of the newly unified country. He was not popular for long, and the Arab Spring swept Yemen up in its dreams of a more democratic and equitable Middle East.

THE CHILDREN HOLDING AK-47S—this was new. Mokhtar landed in Sana’a on October 27, 2014, and was confronted with the patchwork of overlapping military units, security forces and ragtag groups of Houthi or pseudo-Houthi rebels all over the airport and the roads to the capital. How did a small group of hillbillies take over the country? Mokhtar had lived in California most of his life and that was the corollary that came to his mind: it was as if some almost-unknown militia from near the Oregon border swept down and took over Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles, all without any significant resistance. One day Yemen had been ruled by President Hadi, and the next he was on the run, and this northern rebel group, the Houthis—who had scarcely had any real influence

Ahmed told them the truth—that Mokhtar was trying to get out of the country through the port in Aden, that they were transporting a small sampling of Yemeni coffee. The soldiers wanted to see it. Mokhtar got out and untied the suitcase. He knew it looked unusual, and admitted to the soldiers that using a giant flatbed truck to carry one black suitcase had the appearance of something nefarious. He laughed. The Houthis did not share his mirth. Mokhtar opened the case, showed the soldiers the beans, and soon heard himself explaining the history of coffee in Yemen, how he intended to restore the global stature of Yemeni beans. He went on and on as he always went on and on. The soldiers didn’t care about the history of Yemeni coffee. “Go,” they said. Ahmed drove away.

“This guy’s crazy,” the driver said, not realizing the crazy man was riding in his car. When he and Andrew had hired that boat, they hadn’t quite grasped how people back home would see it. They’d left Mokha during multiple firefights, hired a skiff and crossed the Red Sea—because they didn’t want to miss a trade show.

They left the Presidio that day with an improbable plan that, a few months later, had been realized. Based on Founders’ pledge, they brought in Endure. Based on Endure’s commitment, they brought in funds from another firm, 500 Startups. They were suddenly a very real company. They could pay for the coffee to get to the U.S. They could pay their farmers. And they could pay themselves. — Mokhtar had a new thought. Now, he might even be able to afford his own apartment. For the time being, he was still sleeping on the floor at his parents’ house in Alameda—they’d moved again—and inches from Wallead, whose snoring was an affront to propriety and the enemy of slumber.