The Monk of Mokha - Dave Eggers

Review & Rating: 8+/10

A story of one man’s journey of escaping civil war and captivity export Yemeni coffee beans to the West for the first time in 80 years. The book uses Mokhtar Alkanshali’s story as a foundation to expand on cursory topics like Yemeni culture, the conflict in the Middle East through the eyes of locals, the history of coffee, the coffee industry, and the full process of growing to drinking coffee.

It’s a fascinating story of an entrepreneur from a family of Yemeni immigrants settled in SF’s Tenderloin. A story of how a condo doorman decides to export coffee beans from Yemen while navigating military and social conflicts in a country only 2nd to the U.S. in fire-arms per capita where wearing an AK-47 to a wedding isn’t unusual.

As a coffee snob, this was an amazing book that helped elevate my snobbery. More importantly, it helped me learn more about the conflicts in the Middle East while learning about the culture through the eyes of locals. It was an easy read that could’ve easily been a novel given how surreal Mokhtar’s journey was.

Book Notes:

Tenderloin is not a place you want to go when you go to SF. That’s obvious if you ask the internet anything about SF. But the city got its name from how police and politicians were so well bribed and they lived in the Tenderloin area and they ate so well (the best beef) that it’s called after expensive steak cuts.

“Keep the money in your hand, never in your heart.”

Mokhtar’s learned as a car salesman that “Some of the wealthiest people liked dimple cars and paid cash. The aspirational types water the car loaded with extras, and they liked to finance.”

On negotiations from selling cars, the process is to make an offer and shut up. The first one to speak next loses. “Whoever fucking talks next loses.”

The basics of gas stations: “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.” This is exceptionally in-line with my memory of Alimentation Couche-tards businesses as well.

Yemenis are an insular Arab community. Yemeni Americans rarely marry outside their community.

Yemenis were the first to export coffee.

Coffee is a fruit. It’s red and looks like a grape. The coffee we drink comes from the beans inside the fruit.

People used to eat the sweet fruit and spit out the seeds (the coffee beans!). This also means a coffee tree can be grown from unroasted coffee beans.

The first coffee was brewed by a Sufi holy man living in Mokha (Mocha!). It was called qahwa.

Sufi monks used coffee in religious ceremonies and traveled throughout Africa and the Middle East with it. The Turks called in kahve which is how we come to know it as coffee.

The first Sufi monk to brew it, Al-Shadhili, became known as the Monk of Mokha.

Early coffeehouses starts in shady areas with prostitution and gambling. It was a low-brow thing often shut down by gov’ts.

Ethiopia was the home of the first coffee bush but Yemen was the first to cultivate it and organize trade around it.

Ethiopia was the 4th largest producer of coffee in the world (book was published in 2018).

Yemeni farmers stopped exporting coffee over the years as it was less economical than qat. It seems similar to chewing tobacco but it’s illegal in the U.S but it’s part of every man’s daily life in Yemen.

Reviving the Yemeni coffee trade became a mission for Mokhtar. It’s an odd journey that starts with inspiration from a statue of a Yemeni man sipping coffee in SF, learning about the history of coffee in Yemen, combined with a desire for a purpose in life (by 25 he was a doorman for a nice condo in the city).

Coffee was brought to India in 1500 from a Muslim holy man who traveled through Yemen. India is the 6th largest coffee producer.

The Dutch introduced coffee to Europe in 1615 from Mokha to Venice. It was first used for medicinal purposes. It was later brought to Amsterdam but the climate wasn’t conducive so it was brought to the Dutch colony of Java in 1658. Java soon became the primary supplier of coffee to Europe, given the Dutch naval dominance and the Dutch East India company’s success in trade. Many people still call coffee java!

The French cultivated coffee in their own colony of Martinique in 1713. It replaced the primary crop, cocoa.

The Brazilian colonel Francisco de Melo Palheta (I think there is a roaster that uses his last name) took coffee beans from the French colonies and brought them to Brazil in 1727. By 1840, Brazil was responsible for 40% of the world coffee production.

By 2014, coffee became a $70b industry.

Mokhtar ended up starting the business of exporting Yemeni coffee beans because of his mission to educate the world on Yemen (history and present). He had to choose between being a businessman or activist and the success of the former would lead to educational aspirations being achieved as a result.

Mokhtar learned the money in coffee was to buy the green beans, roast them and sell them, Controlling the supply chain and purchasing beans from the point of origin were the only way to have a decent margin.

“Next to gasoline, it might be one of the most recession-proof commodities of all. Fuel for the machines, fuel for the people.”

Coffee came to Vienna in the late 1600s after the Viennese defeat over the Ottomans and discovering a bunch of beans in their camp. The first coffee house for central Europe was called The Blue Bottle.

The Viennese didn’t like the black brew and spoonfuls of cream and honey were added. This seems to be how the Viennese coffee called the Melange started.

The Blue Bottle coffee that I, and most people in the 21st century, know of was started in the 2000s by James Freeman, a professional clarinetist, in Oakland.

The coffee plant is called coffea arabica and it can grow up to 40 feet tall but 6-10 feet is most ideal. It flowers 2x a year and that’s when the cherries grow too. They go from yellow to green to red. They are picked when red and the hundreds produced by one tree may ripen at different times. Good pickers can get 360 cherries in a day. Holy fuck that’s a lot.

Cherries have to be rested 3-6 months and go through a hand sorting process as one bad bean can ruin a batch that’s being roasted.

Good coffees are to be roasted gently, lightly, and in small batches. Dark roasts hid the greatness in coffee. This is why I believe most franchises forcibly burn their coffee so they taste bitter (i.e. Starbucks). It’s easier to mass produce bitter dark coffee than a light roast that reveals how shitty it is.

Roasted beans reach peak flavour on the 3rd day and decline after the 7th day. Grinding the bean three days after roasting is most ideal and one should brew it immediately after grinding.

First wave coffee resulted in the birth of instant coffee mixes by Japanese American Satori Kato in 1900s. It allowed coffee to last longer but tasted awful and people got into the habit of mixing it with sugar and milk.

Second wave started in the 1960s with Peet’s and later Howard Schultz of Starbucks. It was a move to improve the quality of coffee (focusing on the origin of the beans) and the price as well.

Third wave started (I’d say in the 21st century) with independent roasters that roasted on premise and popularized the pour over method. I’d argue that North Americans think they are in the front of third wave coffee but my experience in South Korean and Japan suggest otherwise as the default in most coffee shops there is a pour over.

Mokhtar became the first Q grader for arabica coffee who was actually of Arabian descent. The irony was that he paid a Dutchman to teach him how to pass the tests.

Q graders are the experts on the quality of arabica coffee and are the ones who can score it. There are R graders for robusta coffee but it’s less prestigious. So a Q grader would be akin to a wine sommelier. The program was established in 2004 with 2k graders after 10 years.

The bloom period - why you wait 45secs after pouring hot water into ground beans. You are letting the coffee’s gases to release.

Sana’a, Yemen’s largest city, became Mokhtar’s base and in 2014 it was a war zone with CIA drone strikes against the Al-Qaeda that had been controlling Yemen since 1992. Western foreigners were prime targets for kidnapping and assassination and 53 had been assassinated in a span of 2 months.

Kidnapping of foreigners was considered common, in good and bad times. It wasn’t only a way of getting money but it was also seen as a way to get the attention of the Yemeni gov’t to fix faulty electricity grids by getting international spotlight through the kidnapping and shaming their own gov’t to act.

“…dreams are heavy things, requiring constant care and pruning.”

“In the Arab way - make note of something, compliment anything, and it will be offered to you..."

To paint a picture of how Mokhtar was sourcing beans, he’d have to go to rural tribal areas in Yemen. Shit was so dangerous he carried a dagger and pistol with him and his car always had a driver with a semi-automatic and another man who had an AK-47 and a grenade. Of the 25m in Yemen, 13m had guns. Only second to the U.S. in the world’s most armed nation per capita. People wore AK-47s when walking around and even brought them to weddings.

Houthis accounted for about 35% of the Muslim in Yemen. They controlled northern Yemen and were in constant conflict with the Saudis. They are part of a civil war against the Yemeni gov’t, with the Saudis intervening in 2015.

A thing on AK-47s. The Pre-1974 models were more accurate than the modern ones, which are more powerful and efficient.

“They were pushing a taxi with an exposed propane tank while machine-gun fire rattled over their heads. They couldn’t run away. All their coffee was in the taxi.”

A perspective on what Mokhtar goes through in the airport:

“You work in a racist institution. You should know about these things. I’ve been through four hours of screenings and I missed the flight. That’s why I’m here getting a new flight. And you’re putting me through another screening because I’m brown.”

Men wore grenades on their chest to signal their willingness to take any conflict to the end. After the Houthi’s took over Sana’a, Mokhtar started wearing grenades on his chest.

A trip to export 18 tons of coffee beans would need multiple trucks, each with an armed escort where a vehicle would have at least three guns. The beans alone would cost $250k USD for exporting to the West.

With the beans, Mokhtar had to get them sorted and he hired a group of women in Sana’a. Because the women had to wear their niqabs in front of him, he made a space with high walls and a door that locked from the inside so the women could take off their niqabs.

“…terrorists often set off a second bomb once rescuers had arrived to treat the wounded from the first.”

“..terrorists had made a habit of bombing funeral gatherings to double their body count.”

The Saudis started bombing the Houthi occupied Sana’a and Mokhtar’s story of escape through the bombardment that tore out buildings with no disregard for civilian life is just gut wrenching. Of many strokes of luck that helped him escape with the coffee beans he was determined to bring to the U.S. is how they were able to get through a Houthi checkpoint possibly because a truck they found just happened to have the Houthi slogan of “God is Great. Death to America.” Before boarding a ship to leave Yemen, they stayed in a hotel that got bombed the day after they left.

The Yemeni Way. Skin in the game:

“If Mokhtar and Andrew didn’t call within that time, that meant something had gone wrong, that they’d likely been sold to pirates. In that case, Ali and Ahmed were authorized to kidnap relatives of the captain. It was the Yemeni way."

“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.”

At the trade show in Seattle, Mokhtar and his beans became famous. Freeman at Blue Bottle bought all the beans, they became the most expensive coffee sold at Blue Bottle for $16. At the trade show, Mokhtar also met an investor from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund who helped bring in seed-stage investors to fund the beginning of the Port of Mokha coffee to bring shipments of the beans over.

The first major shipment of beans from Mokha came in 2016, the second in 2017 (sold out in 32 days) and the Port of Mokha’s Haymah beans received a rating of 97 by the Coffee Review (the highest rating they’d given in its 22 year history).