by Dave Eggers
He became familiar with the drinks, exotic twenty years ago, now standard. There was an espresso, which contained basically the same amount of beans as a cup of coffee, but finely ground and concentrated in a much smaller amount of water. There was a café au lait, half coffee and half steamed milk. There was a macchiato, a double shot of espresso topped with foam. There were the drinks borrowed from or based on drinks popular abroad. The espresso romano was a shot of espresso with a slice of lemon served on the side, not to be confused with the guillermo, one or two shots of espresso poured over slices of lime. Algeria gave the world the mazagran, a cold coffee drink made with coffee and ice, and sometimes rum or sugar or lemon, served in a tall glass. There were various coffees with cheese—cheese dunked in a cup of hot coffee and later eaten when the mixture softly congealed. In the Spanish-speaking world, there was guarapo con queso, made with Gouda or Edam. Among the Swedes it was called kaffeost and employed the Finnish cheese leipäjuusto. There was iced coffee and cold-brew coffee. There was Thailand’s black tie—a mixture of black tea (chilled), sugar, and condensed milk, crushed tamarind, star anise, orange-blossom water, and a double shot of espresso. There was Irish coffee (with whiskey), English coffee (with gin), and calypso coffee (with Kahlúa and rum). In Senegal there was café touba, where the beans were mixed with selim and other spices during roasting, and sugar was added to the hot coffee—making a very sweet and aromatic drink. In Australia there was the ice shot, a shot of espresso dumped into a latté glass filled with ice.
At the fringes were some very strange things, none odder than kopi luwak, otherwise known as civet coffee. Coffee had been grown in Sumatra for 150 years, but only recently was it discovered that the civet, a catlike mammal indigenous to the island, was something of a coffee connoisseur. The civet was expert at picking the ripest cherries to eat, and afterward, its feces were found to have done all the processing work usually requiring man and machine and much water. That is, while the coffee cherry passed through the civet’s digestive system, the skin and pulp and mucilage were removed, leaving only the beans, which the civet couldn’t digest. Someone got the idea to take these beans and separate them from the feces—to pick up civet feces, and pick coffee beans from the feces, and to roast and grind and drink these beans. Something in the civet’s digestive tract gave the coffee an unusual and strangely appealing taste—musky and smooth. Kopi luwak became popular, and its purveyors were able to demand a premium for it. Willem was not impressed. He liked to repeat an expression coined by George Howell, a well-known coffee roaster. “Coffee from assholes, for assholes,” he said.
—
Willem, Stephen, Jodi and Marlee welcomed Mokhtar’s help. Boot Coffee was so overrun with visitors that having one more hanger-on didn’t make much difference. A bewildering parade of nationalities came through for classes, cuppings and consultations: Koreans and Uzbekis, Japanese and Croatians and Russians. Plenty of Germans, plenty of Dutch, some French, some Canadians, a few Malaysians, lots of Chinese and Australians. They gathered at the round table, cupping and noting and drawing on the chalkboard. The sessions lasted hours, and would be decidedly unpretentious. People even laughed. There was a looseness and an openness that would have surprised anyone who assumed that a cupping, where coffees were rated and discussed, would be insufferable. Still, the sentences spoken could be rarefied.
“I taste classical jasmine and rose.”
“I found it a little brassy.”
“I picked up some Fuji apple.”
“I tasted a whole flowerpot.”
“The promise of aromatics was so strong that I was disappointed in the aftertaste.”
The cupping and scoring done, often it was up to Mokhtar to tidy up, to pour the extra coffee down the drain and wipe the counters. He liked to stay late, to be alone with the cooling coffee, with the idle machines with their guages and knobs, the beans in their carefully labeled containers—the space a hybrid of kitchen, chemistry lab and furnace room. With everyone gone, Mokhtar would take up a clean spoon and circle the cups, reading the notes and scores attached to each.
He needed to taste what the others were tasting.
CHAPTER XIX
PASSING THE Q
HE WASN’T A Q grader, and knew he had to be. 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. A Q grader has completed intensive coursework and has passed a rigorous test to prove he or she can differentiate between bad coffee and good coffee, between good coffee and superior coffee. Being a Q grader is something akin to what a sommelier is to wine, a grand master is to chess. Like so much of third-wave concentration on quality and expertise, the Q-grading program was very new, established in 2004. Ten years later, there were still only two thousand Q graders in the world. And Willem was correct: among those two thousand, not one was an Arab. This seemed like the kind of obvious challenge that Mokhtar was meant to overcome. A vision gripped him, of returning to Yemen, arriving in Sana’a and striding through the country as the world’s first Arab Q grader. An important man.
The class was two grand, and he couldn’t ask Omar for more money. His mind searched for other donors and arrived at his uncle Yassir, his father’s younger brother. Yassir, an entrepreneur, lived in Modesto, where he ran the family grocery business, expanding Hamood’s operations to a string of stores along Highways 99 and 5. Yassir would understand.
Mokhtar didn’t tell Yassir why he was coming. He only said he had some news. When he arrived, Mokhtar set up all his gear as Yassir, his wife Fairouz and their seven kids, all under fourteen, watched, baffled. Mokhtar had brought three varietals from Ethiopia, his Chemex set, a small digital scale, a gooseneck kettle, a coffee grinder and a popcorn maker, which he planned to use to roast the beans the Ethiopian way—flat on a pan.
He weighed the coffee beans and roasted them, the exuberant aroma filling the room. When they had cooled, he took out his grinder.
“What are you doing?” one of the kids asked.
“I’m grinding the beans,” he said. “Otherwise it’s just a bean. I grind the beans into a powder so they can dissolve in water. And it’s key that we use a medium-coarse grind.”
“What does that mean, ‘medium-coarse grind’?” they asked.
“As opposed to fine or coarse. When we’re using a Chemex, we favor a medium-coarse grind.” Stephen had taught him this.
“What’s a Chemex?”
Mokhtar showed them the glass vessel, a clear carafe, about ten inches high, cinched tight in the middle, giving it the look of an hourglass with an open top. “This is where I’ll pour the coffee. I’ll pour it into the top, and the filters will catch the grounds but let the coffee go through.”
“Is that the filter?”
“A special kind,” he said. It was simple, though, just a square piece of filter paper, really, but the handling of it was key. He took the square piece of filter paper and folded it to a fourth of its size, then shaped it into a funnel—it was crucial that one side was three-ply and the other one-ply. Mokhtar ran the funnel under the faucet, to make it moist, and then inserted it onto the top of the glass vessel.
“You gonna pour the water now?” the kids asked. They were suddenly impatient.
“The water has to be the right temperature,” he said. “Let’s see how it’s doing.”
The water had been boiling in the small gooseneck kettle, the ideal temperature between 195 and 205 degrees. The pot sat on a small dais with a digital readout.
“You tell me when the water’s at two hundred and two,” he said.
Using a tablespoon, Mokhtar scooped the ground coffee into the funnel and spread it evenly.
“It’s at two hundred and two!” one of the kids reported.
“Now watch,” Mokhtar said as he poured the water into the funnel in three distinct stages. First, he poured water onto the filter to soak the paper and to fl
ush out any taste of paper. Then he poured just enough water to soak the grounds.
“Why are you waiting?” they asked.
“I have to wait forty-five seconds now,” he said. “This is called the bloom period, when the coffee’s gases are first released.”
They waited the forty-five seconds, and then Mokhtar carefully poured the rest of the water in, circling it around the grounds until the gooseneck was spent.
“Now what?”
“Now we watch the coffee drip down,” he said.
The water soaked up the grounds, emulsified the coffee, and dropped through the filter and into the lower half of the Chemex. Mokhtar had made enough for three cups, and when it was ready, he removed the filter, threw it into the compost, and poured cups for Yassir, Fairouz and himself. Yassir and Fairouz politely sipped, and as they did, Mokhtar talked about the history of Yemeni coffee and hinted at his plans to get involved in importing beans from their ancestral home. At the end of the presentation, though, Yassir and Fairouz didn’t understand the connection between the elaborate coffee presentation they’d just witnessed and what Mokhtar was going to do with his life. Their nephew was twenty-five years old and had no job and no college degree. The steadiest work he’d had was as a doorman. Yassir didn’t see how pouring coffee was going to do much to advance his life goals.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in law school?” he asked.
—
Back at Boot Coffee, Willem had conjured a plan. He had cowritten his Coffee Quality Institute report on Yemeni coffee with another expert, Camilo Sánchez, and Camilo and Willem thought that with CQI funding, they could put together a trip to Sana’a. They would gather Yemeni growers and international buyers, and maybe forge some connections to help the country’s struggling coffee industry.
Mokhtar would go with them and serve as translator and cultural bridge, but most important, after the conference, he and Willem and Camilo would travel around the country on what Willem was calling a coffee caravan. They would take an SUV or two into the country’s coffee producing regions, meeting the farmers, roasting beans and cupping coffee. They would identify which regions were producing high-quality cherries, and where they might be able to help farmers with education and potential partnerships. All along, they’d have a grand time.
This would be the culmination of Willem’s consulting services, and then it would be up to Mokhtar to continue the work in Yemen.
“But you need to be a Q grader first,” Willem said.
—
Now it was April 2014, and they planned to leave in May. Boot Coffee was holding one Q-grading class before the conference in Sana’a, so Mokhtar had no choice but to go back to Omar for more help. It put him in a position of extraordinary debt to one man, but Omar didn’t hesitate—he put up the fee for the class, and Mokhtar enrolled.
The instructor was not some enigmatic professor from a faraway land but Jodi Wieser, whom he’d been working next to for months.
“I’m nervous,” she told the class. She’d taught dozens of Q-grading sessions, but never as lead instructor, and the pressure on an instructor was extraordinary, given the expense of the course and the great distances the students had traveled to take it.
They were a far-flung group, and much was riding on their success. There were two students from Mexico who ran Buna Café Rico in Mexico City. They seemed to be the most experienced and most confident. The other two students embodied the kind of high-stakes pressure so many of the students felt. One student, a woman in her thirties, had taken the Q test twice and failed. If she didn’t pass this time, she’d have to retake the entire class. And this time, she was pregnant. It was a factor Jodi hoped would help her—perhaps her increased olfactory sensitivities would be to her advantage. The last student was a Kuwaiti man who’d arrived a week early to take classes with Willem. During the coursework with Jodi, he seemed burdened. He had come very far for this, determined to be the first Q grader from Kuwait, just as Mokhtar wanted to be the first Yemeni.
Though there was sometimes a certain status seeking among some students—a way to be or seem elevated among their peers in the specialty coffee world—Jodi grounded the course in the real impact Q grading could have on producers, farmers, on every part of the production chain. That was the original motivation for the Q course. It was instigated by the Coffee Quality Institute as a way to empower coffee growers. In many producing regions, particularly before the third wave, the farmers don’t know much about their coffee. Very often they didn’t drink it—especially in Yemen. Because they didn’t know much about the quality of their own product, they were at the mercy of brokers and commodity pricing. But if farmers became expert Q graders, they would know what they had. If they had a great coffee, they could rate it, and find buyers who would pay far-higher prices for a high-scoring coffee than they would a coffee of unknown quality.
The CQI, then, was committed to leading as many farmers as possible into Q-grading courses. When the farmers, millers, exporters, roasters and retailers were all having a common conversation about the same coffee, then real empowerment could happen. If a Rwandan producer knows how to improve his coffee, and can cup it and rate it, he can bring it to the 90s. On a scale that topped out at 100, anything in the 90s was considered extraordinary, and that farmer could transform his business from a low-wage commodity at the mercy of the world commodity market into a specialty business wherein he could work directly with roasters of his choosing.
This was the gist of Jodi’s first-day speech. She told the story of going to a farm in Panama, and cupping with that farm’s owner, who had become a Q grader a few years before. She and the farmer had cupped twelve local varietals, and on every single coffee, their scores were within one point of each other. Having a common international language to assess quality made for a powerful economic tool.
—
The course was hard, and the tests were harder. Only about 50 percent of those who took the Q test passed the first time. There were twenty-two parts to the test, some of which would seem, to the generalist or everyday coffee enthusiast, insane in their specificity.
The most accessible and concrete part was the General Knowledge exam—one hundred multiple-choice questions about coffee cultivation, harvesting, processing, grading, roasting and brewing. The rest of the tests, though, required a freakish level of sensory sensitivity.
There was the Olfactory Skills test, wherein the blindfolded student had to discern thirty-six different scents, including garden peas, maple, cooked beef, butter and tea rose.
The Cupping Skills test required the student to identify and rate various coffees, African and Asian, mild and strong, processed and naturals, and these ratings had to line up with precedent. If a coffee had been previously rated at 94, the student, testing it blind, had to score it within two points of the established rating.
For Triangulations, the student was given six sets of three cups. Two of the three cups were identical, and one was something else. The student had to identify the outlier. The Organic Acids Matching Pairs test started with eight sets of four cups of coffee. Two cups in each set were tainted with some kind of acid—phosphoric, malic, citric or acetic. The student had to be able to tell which cup had been altered, and by which acid. For the Sample Roast Identification test, the student started with four cups of brewed coffee and had to discern which was overroasted, which was underroasted, and which was perfect.
The Arabica Roasted Coffee Grading test required the student to take a one-hundred-gram sample of roasted beans and identify any quakers—undeveloped beans that didn’t roast correctly—and also identify if the sample was of commercial, premium or specialty grade.
In his months at Boot, Mokhtar had been around the course as others had taken it. He’d cupped and watched dozens of cuppings. But when it came time to take the test, he felt like he was starting over. And Jodi was nervous for him. And for the Kuwaiti. And for the pregnant woman. Jodi wanted everyone to pass.
After th
e testing, the students were given their results. The two Mexican students passed easily. The pregnant woman passed. But the Kuwaiti didn’t, and when it was time for Jodi to tell Mokhtar, she hesitated. She scratched her neck, stared at the floor. She couldn’t look him in the eye.
“You didn’t pass,” she said. “You failed seven of the tests.”
Mokhtar paused. He did the math.
“You mean I passed fifteen of the tests?” He was ecstatic. He hadn’t scored that high on a test since junior high.
—
But there was no time to retake the test before the trip to Yemen. He would return as a young man with an idea, but not yet the Important Man he’d imagined he’d be when he made his return. Only now did he tell his parents what he’d been up to. He showed them a picture of his coffee equipment, the same apparatus he’d brought to Yassir’s house.
They did not see coffee as a serious use of his time.
When he told his brother Wallead he was going back to Yemen, Wallead said, “Really? Who died?”
BOOK III
CHAPTER XX
HAMOOD AND HUBAYSHI
“DON’T TELL ANYONE WHY you’re here.”
That was his grandfather Hamood’s advice.