The Monk of Mokha

by Dave Eggers

These plants became the foundation of the Brazilian coffee industry, which by 1840 accounted for 40 percent of the world’s production. One of Brazil’s largest markets was the burgeoning colonies of North America. The Dutch had introduced coffee there in the 1600s, and it was reasonably popular, always sharing primacy with tea. But as tensions grew between the colonists and the British Crown, and as taxes on tea grew ever more onerous, the colonists began to see tea as emblematic of the British yoke. On December 16, 1773, hundreds of colonists, most of them dressed as Native Americans, met four ships of the British East India Company in Boston Harbor, and they dumped all the tea on board the ships into the sea. Tea drinking in the United States was never the same. Coffee became the stimulant of choice for the new nation, bought primarily from the Dutch—thus the moniker “java.” Its popularity grew in spurts until the twentieth century, when mass production, better storage and packing techniques—Hills Bros. being instrumental in much of this—and demand wrought by World War I and World War II all conspired 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 a...