The Monk of Mokha

by Dave Eggers

  But Yemen, the region that had started the cultivation of the coffee plant in the first place, was now a tiny and largely ignored player in the world coffee market. Mokhtar had the idea that he could change that. But first he had to see Ghassan Toukan.

  CHAPTER XII

  SAGE ADVICE FROM GHASSAN TOUKAN

  PART II

  GHASSAN TOUKAN LOOMED LARGE in Mokhtar’s mind. With any talk of money, or starting a business, he first thought of Ghassan.

  After his stint tutoring, or trying to tutor, the young Mokhtar Alkhanshali, Ghassan went to San Jose State University thinking he’d learn everything he needed to know to launch his own tech start-up. But the pace was slow and the professors at the time, most of them converted math professors, were out of step. They couldn’t teach him what he wanted to know. Ghassan dropped out and started his own consulting business, building and improving computers for friends. Meanwhile, he worked at a cell-phone shop in San Francisco, on Market Street. His parents expected their son to get an undergraduate degree, and perhaps a master’s. They were aghast to see their dropout son working at a cell-phone store on a shady block of mid-Market.

  But Ghassan had designs. He and a friend built an e-commerce platform and created their own company, the LX Group. A few years later it was acquired by NetSuite, the e-commerce behemoth, for a respectable sum. Ghassan was not yet a landed man of leisure, but he had done extraordinarily well, and Mokhtar had been paying attention. He and Ghassan had stayed in touch over the years, and now that Mokhtar had this coffee notion, he wanted to talk it over with the most successful entrepreneur he knew.

  They agreed to meet at Four Barrel Coffee in the Mission. Ghassan arrived first, expecting Mokhtar to be late, but Mokhtar was uncharacteristically on time. And he was carrying some kind of picture frame. Was he really carrying a picture frame? Ghassan wondered. He was. Mokhtar had brought a framed picture to the meeting. It was enormous.

  “Check this out,” Mokhtar said, and unveiled it. It was a reproduction of an English-language newspaper from 1836. On the front page there was an engraving of the ancient port of Mocha. Mokhtar launched into a long and meandering monologue about coffee, Yemen, the port of Mocha, the two spellings—which spelling did Ghassan like, by the way, Mocha or Mokha?—how he’d discovered his connection to all this, and how he planned to become a coffee importer-exporter and revive the ancient art and prominence of coffee from his ancestral land. Ghassan didn’t know what to say. Mokhtar was all over the map.

  “Do you have a business plan?” Ghassan asked.

  Mokhtar unveiled his business plan with the same flourish he’d given the framed newspaper. It was a stack of multicolored paper an inch thick—a bizarre combination of manifesto, history lesson, idea dump and rant.

  “And this,” Mokhtar said, pointing to a page full of bullet points. The bullet points alone, Mokhtar implied, made it a business plan, and made it a great one.

  Ghassan looked at it. He tried to read it. Finally he took a breath and said, “Mokhtar, I have to be honest with you. This is the ghettoest business plan I’ve ever seen.”

  Still, he knew Mokhtar was onto something. He saw the passion in his eyes, on the pages. The business plan had to be rebuilt from the ground up, but there might be something there. They would have to change the name. The Monk of Mocha was wrong with either spelling. Who was the monk? Was Mokhtar the monk? Why was Mokhtar suddenly a monk?

  “No. It’s not me,” Mokhtar said. “It’s this guy from this book I have…Hundreds of years ago, there was a monk in the port of Mokha who—”

  “Forget it. Forget the monks,” Ghassan said. “No monks. Focus on coffee. Focus on the business. Come to think of it, you have to make a choice. Are you a businessman or are you an activist? For now, at least, you have to pick one.”

  Mokhtar’s pages were full of educational aspirations, dreamy language about cross-cultural collaboration, teaching the world about the beauty of Yemen, Yemen beyond terrorism and drones.

  “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.”

  Ghassan left the meeting, and a few days later went to Mecca for pilgrimage, and from there to Japan—it was cherry blossom season and he loved the cherry blossoms—and all the while he thought about Mokhtar and his business plan.

  Ghassan knew about coffee. He’d gotten sucked into the specialty coffee world years before; it was near impossible in San Francisco to avoid it, difficult to avoid becoming at least a dilettante, just as it was impossible not to become passably knowledgeable about technology or wine. But with coffee, Ghassan was only a customer; he’d never had any interest in the business side of it. In fact, he’d spent years convincing a dozen different friends not to open coffee shops. Mokhtar wasn’t the only one who’d come to him for business advice, and over the years an alarming number of those who sought his help were planning to start cafés.

  No, Ghassan had said to every one of them.

  They wanted to create community spaces, spark the next Enlightenment, bring people together in an atmosphere of—

  No. No, no, no, he said. No.

  This was how he spent his time: convincing otherwise sane and successful former techies not to start cafés. There was almost no way to make one profitable, he told them. And a café in San Francisco? High rents and low margins. Your customers will be problematic. Some guy with strenuous facial hair sitting for six hours at one of your tables, fondling his laptop and drinking one cup of coffee, for which the margin was, what, twenty cents? It couldn’t work. The only way to make money in coffee, he told all these would-be café owners, was to buy the green beans, roast them and sell them—control the supply chain, set prices, get the beans from the point of origin. That’s where the margins are.

  But no one ever wanted to do that.

  No one until Mokhtar. So while flying in and out of Saudi Arabia, and while walking under the cherry blossoms in Kyoto, Ghassan thought Mokhtar might really be onto something. He knew that Yemeni coffee was supposed to be good, but that it was difficult to get out of the country. If a Yemeni American went to Yemen, wouldn’t he be a kind of natural bridge between the inaccessible mountains and political mess of Yemen and the world market for these beans?

  After so much time in the ephemeral world of software, Ghassan was looking for something more three-dimensional. Coffee could be smelled and tasted and touched. And it was a commodity, recession-proof. Next to gasoline, it might be one of the most recession-proof commodities of all. Fuel for the machines, fuel for the people.

  “But get serious,” he told Mokhtar that day in the Mission. “At least know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  CHAPTER XIII

  PAST PRETENSE

  MOKHTAR KNEW ABOUT BLUE Bottle. Giuliano had brought him to Blue Bottle. He’d been hearing the name now for years, and Blue Bottles were emerging all over San Francisco. Ever since he started talking about his future in coffee, people had been telling him to go to Blue Bottle, study at Blue Bottle, and he planned to, but first, because he was a man of research and erudition, he dug deeper and found another story of adventure, another man risking his life to get coffee from one place to another.

  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 Viennese elected from among their ranks a young Pole named Franz George Kolshitsky, who had spent time in the Arab world and spoke Arabic and Turkish. The Viennese dressed him in a Turkish soldier’s uniform and sent him through the night, across enemy lines. He made it to the Polish troops and delivered the message. The Poles came to the aid of Vienna, and together they drove back the Ottoman siege. In their retreat, the Turks left much of what they’d brought with them, including twenty-five thousand tents, five thousand camels, ten thousand oxen and five hundred bags of small, hard green beans.

  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. Success did not come. The Viennese didn’t take to this new beverage. It was too strong, too bitter. To blunt its edge and save his business, Kolshitsky added a spoonful of cream and a bit of honey. Now the crowds arrived. His concoction was replicated and disseminated. He’d invented Viennese coffee and had brought coffeehouses to Europe.

  About 320 years later, there appeared an American named James Freeman, who among coffee eccentrics seemed uniquely qualified to be king. He had once been a professional clarinetist—second chair in the Modesto, California, symphony. He was also a home-brewing coffee hobbyist, a purist frustrated by the ever-permutating bastardizations of coffee—the pumpkin-spiced lattes, the caramel macchiatos. He wanted to return to the basics, to allow customers to taste the actual coffee, brewed in front of them, cup by cup. He harbored dreams of building a larger roaster, which would combine elements of an adobe oven and a rotating drum—and would be powered by either a human (or a dog, he noted) running on an attached treadmill. He took his design to various planning and health officials in Oakland, who were bewildered and unamused.

  Eventually Freeman settled into roasting on a Diedrich IR-7, manufactured in Sandpoint, Idaho, and powered by standard electricity. He set up shop in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley, where he pioneered a very slow and methodical way to make coffee, every cup its own unique undertaking, drip by drip. His little shop quickly evolved from neighborhood curiosity to something with a cult following. He called it Blue Bottle.

  —

  Blue Bottle’s headquarters were now in Oakland’s Jack London Square. Every Sunday, Blue Bottle ran an open cupping session, where anyone could come and witness and participate in cuppings, analyzing the tastes of various brewed coffees.

  Ghassan couldn’t come that first time, so Mokhtar brought Omar Ghazali, to whom he still owed three thousand dollars and who, he hoped, might see an opportunity. Omar knew fruit, and coffee was a fruit, and Omar knew start-ups, and knew Yemen. With the cash from his fruit business, Omar had invested in a T-shirt business, a sheep operation, a phone-card scheme. He was open to new opportunities.

  When they arrived that Sunday, there were about a dozen other people assembled, and though Mokhtar feared, and expected, that it would be a highly pretentious place, he and Omar found it welcoming and largely free of attitude. The Blue Bottle staff had set out about forty cups on a high table, each filled with a different coffee, each a different roast and varietal. Then they demonstrated how they assessed the taste and quality of every coffee by taking a spoon to each cup, bringing it to their lips, and then, instead of just drinking that spoonful, they slurped it. It had something to do with oxygenating the coffee, bringing out its full flavor. Thus they would slurp from each cup, swish it a bit in their mouths and then, using another, taller cup that they carried with them, they would spit out each spoonful.

  Mokhtar said nothing. He just watched. But he could tell Omar wanted to smile or laugh or walk out and never come back. The man in charge walked from cup to cup, slurping—loudly—and then spitting, and it was impossible to imagine how this could possibly lead to a better assessment of any coffee. Why not drink it? Why not drink more than a spoonful? And wasn’t the slurping distracting on some elemental level?

  But then it was his turn, and Mokhtar took his spoon to the cup in front of him. He let a small pool of the brown liquid fill the spoon, and he brought it to his lips, wondering as he did what kind of sound his slurping would make when he actually slurped. When he did, the sound was quick and high-pitched, and though he expected that at least someone in the room would be laughing when he looked up, no one was, and he swished the coffee in his mouth and tried to think what it tasted like.

  Was it toasty? He wrote down toasty. Was it fruity? He’d heard the word fruity a lot that day, so he wrote down fruity. Nearby, someone said they tasted chocolate notes, and Mokhtar said he did, too. The class veered between the practical and the impenetrable. It lasted an hour and included far too much information to absorb—there was talk of varietals, and flavor notes, and first crack, second crack, of light roast and dark roast and Guatemalans and the five layers of the coffee fruit.

  Mokhtar’s head felt heavy and his soul was discouraged. He was masterful at taking in vast amounts of information and regurgitating it quickly, but this was too much. Still, afterward he felt compelled to approach the man who had led the class, Thomas Hunt, to tell him his plans. He told him he was from a Yemeni family that had been growing coffee for centuries and that he would soon return to Yemen to revive the art of Yemeni coffee and bring it to the specialty coffee market. Thomas, while being moderately encouraging, mentioned that Yemeni coffee had a reputation for being dirty and inconsistent and that getting the coffee out of the country had challenged any number of experienced exporters before Mokhtar.

  I can make it better, Mokhtar thought, and I can get it out.

  He had no reason to believe either was true or possible.

  Mokhtar returned to Blue Bottle the next week, and this time he brought Justin, who was still considering a foray into olive oil, and the two of them took notes, and cupped, and learned a little more, and again, when the class was over, Mokhtar hung around and reintroduced himself to Thomas and reiterated that he was serious about reviving Yemeni coffee and bringing it to the world’s specialty coffee stage, and creating cross-national cooperation, introducing a different idea of Yemen to the world, a Yemen apart from drones and al-Qaeda. And this time Thomas, whether believing in Mokhtar or wanting to get rid of him by passing him on to someone else, mentioned a man named Graciano Cruz, a Panamanian who was doing the same kind of thing but for coffee in Ethiopia, Peru and El Salvador.

  “You should talk to him,” Thomas said.

  “How?” Mokhtar said, feeling sure that this name, Graciano Cruz, was the next keeper of secrets along his hero’s journey.

  “I’ll send you his e-mail address,” Thomas said.

  But Thomas didn’t send him his e-mail address.

  Every week, Mokhtar went back to Blue Bottle, cupped and learned and lingered, and copied everything written on any whiteboard, and every time, after the session, he asked Thomas for the e-mail address for Graciano Cruz, and every time Thomas said, Sorry, I spaced, and said he would send it the next day—because he insisted Mokhtar and Graciano really should talk, their missions were aligned, they really should know each other—but every week Thomas would forget again.

  Mokhtar continued to come to Blue Bottle, now on weekdays, too, and Thomas and the rest of the Blue Bottle staff allowed it and even put him to work for the public cupping, and soon enough Mokhtar had some mastery of the basics.

  CHAPTER XIV

  THE BASICS

  THERE WAS THE COFFEE plant. He knew the coffee plant.

  Coffea arabica. It was something between a bush and a tree and it seemed acceptable to call it either. Some called it a shrub. It could grow up to forty feet tall, but that wasn’t ideal—ideal was smaller, six to ten feet. It needed a fair amount of water and could thrive in full sun or partial sun, and in most climates flowered twice a year, delicate white petal
s like certain orchids. And when it flowered, it produced cherries that went from yellow to green to red and which, when picked at just the right moment, provided the best coffee. But the beans were deep within the cherry. The cherry, oblong and bright and smooth like a grape, had five layers within it. 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.

  The average coffee tree produced about ten pounds of cherries during any given harvest, and in most countries, every one of the cherries had to be plucked by hand and dropped into a basket carried by a picker. This was just the beginning of the process, one of the most complicated processes for any crop—quite possibly the most complex journey from farm to consumption of any foodstuff known to humankind.