The Monk of Mokha

by Dave Eggers

  - High ethical standards in all affairs

  - Responsibility and accountability

  - Quality over quantity”

  After the Mission there was usually something like Strategic Areas of Focus, so Mokhtar elaborated on that.

  “Strategic Areas of Focus: Our main area of focus is the specialty coffee market. We want our growers to produce high-quality, high-consistency sun-dried arabica coffee beans with clear traceability. Our farmers will use more effective methods of growing, harvesting and processing without losing their traditional and ancient heritage of cultivating, but rather finding a place where the best of the new and old worlds meet.”

  He showed the plan to Ghassan.

  “Better,” Ghassan said.

  —

  Mokhtar had finally tracked down Graciano Cruz, and they’d struck up an online friendship. Graciano told Mokhtar about an event coming up in Los Angeles, where specialty coffee roasters and traders from around the world would gather. “I know the people running the conference,” Graciano told Mokhtar. “Just tell them you know me.”

  Mokhtar didn’t want to go alone and thought he might look more professional if he had an accomplice. He called Giuliano, but Giuliano didn’t want to drive down to LA. Justin didn’t want to drive down to LA, either. No one wanted to make the drive, and Mokhtar didn’t have the funds for a flight, so he called up Rafik, his uncle on his mother’s side. Rafik had been a cop in Oakland but now lived in Richgrove with Sitr, Taj and Rakan.

  Rafik was a man of constant personal reinvention. He was just six years older than Mokhtar but had already lived a dozen lives. He’d been a security guard at the Museum of the African Diaspora. Then a UPS driver. Then an AC Transit bus driver. He’d even lived with Mokhtar’s family on Treasure Island for a year. Finally he joined the police academy, excelled, won awards for marksmanship and was named his class’s valedictorian. He served in Oakland for six years as a beat cop, but eventually hurt his back and was on disability. Back in Richgrove, he was considering his options. Maybe he’d open a hamburger place, or start a grape farm. Maybe a coffee shop.

  Mokhtar asked him if he wanted to go to a conference about specialty coffee. Rafik, who thought of himself as a foodie, agreed. So Mokhtar, aspiring coffee importer/exporter, drove four hours to Richgrove, picked up Rafik, and the two of them drove the next few hours to Los Angeles, Mokhtar filling Rafik’s head with the potential glories of Yemeni coffee, how it could save the country’s trade sector and announce to the world that Yemen had more to offer than drone strikes and qat. But neither man had any idea what to expect at the conference or if they were dressed right, or if they would be asked for credentials, or any proof they belonged there. They didn’t even have business cards.

  The guy at the door, a young bearded man with a wide smile, asked them their affiliation. Mokhtar said he was with Monk of Mocha, a Yemeni American cross-national operation. (He still hadn’t changed the name or decided on the spelling.)

  “Okay,” the bearded man said.

  “We’re resurrecting Yemeni coffee,” Mokhtar said, and continued for a few minutes, talking too much, especially given they hadn’t entered the building yet.

  It was only once they entered the conference that Mokhtar realized that he did not belong. The three largest Ethiopian coffee exporters had come more than nine thousand miles to meet the largest buyers in the American specialty coffee market. People were there from Stumptown, Intelligentsia and Blue Bottle. Mokhtar was neither an Ethiopian coffee grower or an American coffee buyer, and any hopes of blending in, or hiding among hundreds of attendees, were quickly gone. There were only twenty people at the conference.

  Mokhtar and Rafik attended panels and cuppings, pretending to belong. But Mokhtar did not feel he belonged, even after his months at Blue Bottle, and even after spending two hours the night before watching a documentary about the global coffee trade. The film, called Black Gold, focused on the Ethiopian coffee trade, and it was maddening. In demonstrating how commodity pricing of coffee put a low ceiling on what farmers could get for their coffee, it showed how much work there was to do in leveling the playing field for producers.

  But there was one inspiring man in the film, an Ethiopian named Tadesse Meskela, who was on a crusade to change this paradigm. Meskela had managed to organize thousands of Ethiopian farmers and, by working in the specialty coffee export market, had significantly raised their per-kilo prices. But for every thousand farmers he could help, there were ten thousand more unable to compete, and who lived in poverty. In Ethiopia, the pay for a coffee worker was about one dollar a day. Mokhtar knew already that in Yemen, conditions were far better, that wages were more like ten dollars a day. Ethiopia was in a difficult spot, having more coffee, thus less scarcity, a reputation for uneven quality and unreliable delivery. But in the film, Meskela was both fierce and eloquent. He traveled the world representing Ethiopian farmers, and his successes were many, in the marketplace and in the realm of hearts and minds. He had opened a school and a hospital for his farmers.

  And at the conference, there he was, a few feet away.

  “That’s Tadesse Meskela,” Mokhtar told Rafik.

  Rafik had no idea who Tadesse Meskela was.

  “I’m going to introduce myself,” Mokhtar said.

  Rafik did not care.

  Mokhtar was shy, though, and Meskela was never alone. Finally, at lunch, Mokhtar saw Meskela eating with two other Ethiopians. When Mokhtar approached, Meskela looked up, surprised. Besides the Ethiopians, Mokhtar was the only nonwhite person there.

  “Hello sir,” Mokhtar said to Meskela.

  “Where are you from?” Meskela asked.

  “I’m from just across the river from you. Yemen.”

  “Oh Yemen!” Meskela said. “I love Yemeni people.”

  And they were off. So many similarities in their challenges and opportunities, they agreed. They talked quality, and supply chain, best practices and plans. Meskela told Mokhtar he’d been to Yemen for a conference.

  “Was that the Arabica Naturals Conference in Sana’a?” Mokhtar asked.

  Meskela was impressed. They talked about how similar Harar, Ethiopia, was to Yemen. In Harar, they too were having trouble with qat, and were struggling to convince farmers to replace the qat with coffee.

  “Whatever you do, help your farmers,” Meskela said. By this time they were holding hands—a normal thing for men in Yemen and Ethiopia. “If you’re in it for the money,” Meskela said, “you won’t last.”

  He gave Mokhtar his business card, which was oddly three times larger than any business card Mokhtar had ever seen.

  “Visit me if you ever come to Ethiopia,” Meskela said.

  —

  The man running the conference was Willem Boot, a charismatic Dutchman in his early fifties who knew everyone in the room. It turned out he’d coauthored a report on the state of Yemeni coffee, to be published later that year. The report was commissioned by the Coffee Quality Institute (CQI) and funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Mokhtar elbowed Rafik. At an Ethiopian coffee conference in Los Angeles, they had happened upon the man best situated to help him with Yemeni coffee.

  In between conference sessions and cuppings, Mokhtar managed to get a few minutes alone with Willem Boot, and because he wanted to give Willem the idea that he knew what he was talking about, but because he talked so quickly, and because he didn’t yet know what he was talking about, he sprayed Willem Boot with a random mix of words and phrases that had some passing connection to reality. “I want to radically improve and streamline the supply chain to the varietal farmer of the origin of the natural process of the…” After a while he decided to stop talking.

  Boot looked at him with compassion. It was obvious to both of them that Mokhtar had fire but needed firsthand knowledge; everything he knew he’d gotten secondhand. Boot let him know that his company, Boot Coffee, offered consulting services to would-be importers and exporters, and also
Q-grading classes.

  “Okay,” Mokhtar said, though he didn’t know what a Q-grading course was.

  There were fees associated with any of the services or courses, Boot added, but they were well within reach for anyone serious about starting a company.

  “Right,” Mokhtar said, though he had no money or access to it.

  Mokhtar took Boot’s e-mail address and said he’d follow up.

  Boot didn’t know what to think—was this a very young dilettante, some kind of hustler, or the genuine article? And how had he gotten into his conference for Ethiopian growers and American buyers? This seemed like the kind of thing Graciano Cruz would have arranged. He made a mental note to ask Graciano about this man named Mokhtar. In the meantime, he didn’t expect Mokhtar to follow up.

  But he did, the next day. Mokhtar said he wanted to hire Boot as a consultant. The only catch, Mokhtar said, was that he didn’t know if he could get all the way to Holland. Mokhtar assumed Boot Coffee, run by a Dutchman, was in Amsterdam.

  “Why would you go to Holland?” Boot said. “I live in Mill Valley.”

  CHAPTER XVII

  STEALING COFFEE BACK FROM THE DUTCH

  MILL VALLEY WAS JUST north of San Francisco, but Mokhtar had never been to Mill Valley. Mill Valley was in Marin, a county exotic and unknown to Mokhtar, even though it was only ten miles from the Tenderloin. It was green and overgrown, under the shadow of Mount Tamalpais, an evergreen peak rising twenty-five hundred feet above the Pacific coast. Willem and Catherine Boot’s house stood on a winding road just off Miller Avenue, one of the town’s main thoroughfares, but it seemed very much apart from the world. A two-story adobe festooned with wisteria, bamboo and wild roses, their home could have been in Tuscany or Greece.

  That first day, Mokhtar brought Omar with him. After the Los Angeles conference, Mokhtar called him and outlined the possibilities of taking what he’d learned about the Ethiopian coffee trade and applying it to Yemen. Omar was interested. He wanted to meet Willem, too. So the three of them sat outside at a long sturdy table, the kind found in Italian movies where generations eat cheese and prosciutto and children scamper underfoot. In dappled light, Mokhtar and Omar got to know Willem, a man born into coffee.

  His father, Jacob, had been one of the first Europeans involved in coffee’s second wave, long before the popularization of specialty coffee. In the 1970s, when mass manufacturing was diminishing the overall quality of coffee made available to the public, Jacob Boot was trying to get the Dutch hooked on home roasting and single-cup brewing. He had been regional director for a Dutch roaster called Neuteboom, and as a child Willem visited the roastery often, swimming his hands in barrels of green beans. But on the side Jacob had harbored dreams of making and selling a home roaster, so people could control and appreciate the process in their own kitchens. He had invented, and gambled his life savings on, a machine called the Golden Coffee Box. He sold his house and opened a hybrid business where, in a rented storefront, customers could learn about high-quality beans, and a manufacturing arm, where he built and sold the Golden Coffee Boxes.

  This was the seventies, a period when Europeans and Americans preferred their food fast and cheap. Jacob wanted people to slow down, to care about the origin of their comestibles. His business, based in Baarn, a town in Utrecht province, was not a runaway success, but sales of the Golden Coffee Boxes, and the coffee Jacob roasted, were strong enough that he could make a living. Eventually, when Willem was fourteen, he joined his father in the business and learned how to match every customer to specific flavor profiles. An artistic customer might prefer the brightness of a Kenyan coffee. A smoker might need something stronger, maybe a Sumatran bean. An older client might prefer a mellow Mexican Maragogype varietal.

  The business was small and the storefront was never too busy, and Jacob liked it that way. He had time to talk with customers, to hear their stories, to find ways to pair them with the right beans. Jacob’s attention to detail, his passion for every minute fact and nuance of coffee, was limitless. Willem watched his father drive importers to distraction with his questions about the origins of the beans he roasted. If the beans were from Java, he wanted to know where, which farm, what was the elevation, who were the farmers. Most of the importers had no idea.

  Year by year, though, Jacob grew more tired, less able to do the day-to-day, and Willem took over more and more of the roasting. Jacob taught him what he knew, and Willem had the time and machinery to experiment, to gain a knowledge so extensive that after college, he went to work for the American subsidiary of Probat-Werke, a German maker of roasting machines. The company stationed him in California, and there he met his wife Catherine, a native of Napa Valley. Eventually they moved to Mill Valley and set up Boot Coffee, a roastery and educational institute where coffee growers, roasters, academics and other aspirants could learn. Willem became a consultant, training roasters and growers, and emerged as a sought-after judge in coffee competitions around the world, from Central America to Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea.

  —

  That first day in Mill Valley, Willem already had a plan for Mokhtar.

  “If you’re serious about this,” Willem said, “you should become a Q grader. Then you should go to the Specialty Coffee Association of America conference. That’s in Seattle. Then you should go to Yemen.”

  “Okay,” Mokhtar said, already calculating the costs.

  “If you want to improve coffee exported from Yemen,” Willem said, “you have to know what’s good and what isn’t. And as far as I know, you’d be the first Q grader for arabica coffee who’s an actual Arab.”

  “Great,” Mokhtar said, still having no idea what a Q grader was.

  “What’s that course cost?” he asked.

  The course cost two thousand dollars. And to engage Willem as a consultant would require a retainer of five thousand. The irony was not lost on Mokhtar and Omar that two Yemenis—direct heirs to the ancient trade of coffee—were being asked to pay to learn about the business from a Dutchman.

  After the meeting, Mokhtar and Omar got into their cars, and Mokhtar followed Omar a few miles west, onto Highway 1. They stopped at a turnout overlooking the Pacific and performed their noontime prayers. When they rose, Mokhtar said it was too much money. He couldn’t ask Omar for it. Omar had already loaned him three thousand dollars after he’d lost the satchel. Still, he took out his checkbook and wrote Mokhtar a check for five thousand dollars. A line of credit, he called it.

  Nothing like that had ever happened to Mokhtar. His family and his occasional boss or teacher had been encouraging when he’d conjured an idea or even a plan, but no one had ever stepped up like this. He’d never seen that much money in one place. He took the check, got into his car, watched Omar drive away and, alone and overwhelmed, he let himself cry until he couldn’t anymore.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  THE APPRENTICES

  MOKHTAR FORMALLY ENGAGED WILLEM and Boot Coffee, but the relationship was not quite formal. The five-thousand-dollar retainer really was just a way in the door, and once inside, Mokhtar did what he’d done at Blue Bottle, insinuating himself so subtly but thoroughly into the operation that within a week, half the staff at Boot Coffee wasn’t sure if he worked there or not.

  Every day, Mokhtar left early in the morning, beating traffic to drive an hour north, then over the Richmond Bridge and south again into Mill Valley, always arriving when Boot Coffee opened. He did anything asked of him. He ran errands to Safeway and Whole Foods. He cleaned the machines and swept the floor. He watched. He listened. Willem and Catherine traveled frequently, to Panama, to Nicaragua, to Europe, and when they were gone, Willem left the operation in the care of his young staff, Stephen Ezell and Jodi Wieser and Marlee Benefield.

  Stephen was not much older than Mokhtar, and had accomplished the same sort of self-invention Mokhtar was attempting. Stephen was a Florida native who’d studied philosophy in college, had bartended and played in bands until he decided to follow his brother t
o the Bay Area. Stephen was perusing the job listings one day when he circled three intriguing options. One was in wood refinishing, the other in biohazard removal, and the last offered a “coffee opportunity in Mill Valley.” Stephen had worked briefly at a Starbucks in 1999, so he sent his résumé.

  And though he’d been at Boot less than a year, Stephen, with his rust-colored beard and deliberate manner, had the air of an Old World apprentice. He did most of the roasting at Boot, making it a delicate blend of art and science—with a degree of precision and instinct that Mokhtar wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to replicate.

  If Stephen was the young apprentice, Jodi Wieser was the journeywoman—a few years ahead of Stephen in her training. Young and thin, with glasses and strawberry blond hair, she was a center of calm competence. She’d grown up in Dallas, and in high school had worked as a barista at a high-end café where a cup of coffee went for $4—and that was 1996. After college, she’d moved to Africa to do NGO work, first in Mali, then Ivory Coast. She moved back to the United States, got a master’s in intercultural studies and returned to Africa, this time Uganda, where she helped establish a nonprofit, Fount of Mercy, that worked with AIDS widows, orphans and former child soldiers.

  She was joined there by Marlee Benefield, a friend from grad school with the youthful face and sunny attitude of a summer-camp counselor. When Jodi moved back to the U.S., she was looking through Craigslist for jobs with an international angle. She saw an ad Willem had placed. Must love coffee, it said. She joined Boot Coffee in 2008 and became a Q grader in 2010. Marlee followed shortly thereafter and began selling roasters and teaching courses in roasting. Together, Jodi, Marlee and Stephen were, compared to Willem, relatively recent arrivals, and all of them were guided by Willem’s example—they were experts but not snobs, serious about the work without being overly serious about themselves.

  —

  The one thing Willem was adamant about, though, was that Mokhtar needed to become a Q grader. Mokhtar knew this, too, though he still didn’t know precisely what that meant, and there was the small matter of his knowing not much about how coffee tasted. He hadn’t advertised this to anyone, least of all anyone at Boot, but up until then Mokhtar had only had a few dozen cups of coffee in his life. There had been the espressos he’d had with Giuliano, the sips he’d had at Blue Bottle. What had interested him about coffee first had been the history, his pride in Yemen’s central role in its cultivation and dissemination. At Boot, though, he slowed down to savor the taste and discern the varietals, the brewing methods and permutations. At Boot he could finally let his guard down, admitting all he didn’t know.