The Monk of Mokha

by Dave Eggers

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.

The Turks turned qahwa into kahve, which became, in other languages, coffee. Al-Shadhili became known as the Monk of Mokha,

He strapped seven cherries to his belly and wrapped his robe over them loosely, the folds hiding his treasure. In India, he planted the seeds in the Chandragiri Hills, and from those seven cherries, millions of arabica plants flourished. India now is the world’s sixth-largest coffee producer, and Baba Budan is considered a saint.

There was the skin, the red outer covering. Below that was the pulp, an edible and even juicy layer, tougher and leaner than a grape but otherwise not so different in consistency. Below that, there was a very thin layer called the mucilage, and under that, the parchment. Below that, one more very thin layer called the silverskin and, finally, under all that, was the bean, which was really a two-headed seed varying in color from green to khaki.

Everywhere along the line there were people involved. Farmers who planted and monitored and cared for and pruned and fertilized their trees. Pickers who walked among the rows of plants, in the mountains’ thin air, taking the cherries, only the red cherries, placing them one by one in their buckets and baskets. Workers who processed the cherries, most of that work done by hand, too, fingers removing the sticky mucilage from each bean. There were the humans who dried the beans. Who turned them on the drying beds to make sure they dried evenly. Then those who sorted the dried beans, the good beans from the bad. Then the humans who bagged these sorted beans.

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.

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.