The Monk of Mokha

by Dave Eggers

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.”

By eighteen, he knew these people, who had gone to college and could live wherever they wanted, had nothing he didn’t have. They weren’t any smarter, this was clear. They weren’t quicker. They weren’t even more ruthless. If anything, they were softer. But they had advantages. Or they had expectations. Or assumptions. It was assumed they’d go to college. It was assumed they’d find jobs befitting their upbringing and education. There were no such assumptions in Mokhtar’s world.

According to legend, it was in Mokha, a port city on the Yemeni coast, that the bean was first brewed.

The Turks turned qahwa into kahve, which became, in other languages, coffee. Al-Shadhili became known as the Monk of Mokha, and Mokha became the primary point of departure for all the coffee grown in Yemen and destined for faraway markets. Mokha itself was a barren and

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.

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.

“But this isn’t a nonprofit,” Ghassan said. “Start a real business, and all that will happen. Education about Yemen will come through customers’ engagement with the product. And in the meantime you’ll employ actual Yemeni people. And you’ll do something tangible. And you’ll make a living. And you won’t have to ask for donations. And it won’t have to be about Islam. You’re not selling Islamic coffee beans. Sell Yemeni beans. Do that, and do it well, and the rest will follow.”

In 1683, the Ottoman Empire was at the height of its power, occupying a huge swath of eastern and central Europe. The Ottoman Turks, wanting to overtake Vienna, surrounded the city with three hundred thousand troops. The city had little hope of withstanding the Ottoman attack unless the Viennese could send an envoy through the enemy lines to get help from the Polish army 287 miles away. The Polish army could attack from the rear, the Viennese from the front.

The Poles assumed the beans were camel feed, but Kolshitsky knew better. These were coffee beans; in the Arab world he’d seen them roasted and brewed. As a reward for his heroism, he was allowed to keep the beans, and with them he opened the first coffeehouse in central Europe, calling it The Blue Bottle. There he made coffee as he’d learned in Istanbul, and awaited success.

Natural, or dry processing, was the more ancient process, believed to have originated in Yemen and still practiced there. As its name promises, it involves no water. The cherries would be dried on flat beds, usually some kind of latticework like a metal screen, and when dry, they were hulled—run through a rudimentary machine to remove all the layers from the bean. Because the beans weren’t washed, they retained some of the mucilage, and because the beans spent more time inside the fruit absorbing its flavors, dry processing resulted in a fruitier but far less predictable taste. For generations this has been both the bane and boon of Yemeni coffee—it could be either wonderfully rich or of such rough quality that its merits were obscured. After the beans were processed, they were bagged and left to rest. They needed to rest, Mokhtar learned, because the processing was traumatic for the fruit—traumatic for the fruit!—and after such a traumatic process, they needed time to recover. They were still alive, remember, Mokhtar was told. They were seeds, remember. They could still produce a coffee plant. So the resting period can last anywhere between three and six months.

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.

The only way Mokhtar could revive coffee in Yemen, then, was to raise the price paid for Yemeni coffee above that paid for qat. To do that, he had to deal directly with the farmers, and determine a price based on what he could get from international specialty roasters. And to garner a higher price from these specialty roasters, he had to drastically raise the quality of Yemeni coffee cultivation. And he had to begin without having set foot on a Yemeni coffee farm.

A Q grader was essentially an expert on the quality of arabica coffee and uniquely qualified to score it. An R grader was an expert on robusta, but that was considered a far-less-prestigious thing to be.

“If you believe there’s only one path to God, then you’re limiting God,” and thought he was saying something so profound it might forever change their lives.

It was Eid, and as was customary, Mokhtar had brought Hamood a gift. It was an envelope filled with hundred-dollar bills. “Where’d you get this?” Hamood asked. “This is from the boy worth less than a donkey,” Mokhtar said, and smiled.