The Monk of Mokha

  The trees, first of all, needed the same kind of care and guidance as any large plant—they needed to be fertilized, protected from pests and pruned so the lower boughs could produce most of the fruit (for pickers shouldn’t have to use ladders, and besides, the higher boughs produce less fruit).

  Each healthy tree produced hundreds, even thousands, of cherries, and these will ripen twice a year, but not at the same time. That is, on any given bough there will be cherries of a maddeningly wide range of ripeness, and the best (and some would say only) cherries are red, picked at a peak of readiness—the redder they were, the higher the sugar content and the better the taste. Thus the pickers had to be judicious. They must pick the red cherries, let the yellow and green ripen and remove the already overripe. A good picker might be able to fill a thirty-pound bucket in an hour and about twelve buckets a day, meaning about 360 pounds of cherries a day. Ideally those buckets were all red—thousands of red cherries. That would be a day’s work, each requiring an eye, two fingers, a twist.

  These cherries were brought to a central depository on the farm to be processed. A small farm—there are tens of thousands of small farms around the world, many of them only a few acres—would often send its cherries to a shared mill for processing, while the larger farms would do their own processing, but in any case the point was to separate all those layers from the bean itself. That was what the word processing meant—the removal of all five layers from the beans. And to do that, there were two primary methods, wet and dry.

  Wet processing was the most commonly used method, producing what was often called washed coffee. In this process, the red cherries were sent through a pulping machine to remove the outer skin and the pulp. This left the pulp, a viscous and slippery layer, still on the beans. The beans were soaked in water and then allowed to ferment for anywhere from hours to days. The mucilage dried and became easier to detach from the beans. This involved more water. The beans were washed again until all that was left was the green beans. These green beans were then dried for four to eight days, either outside in the sun and air or in mechanical dryers. Wet processing produced a certain uniformity of quality in the beans, which was desirable in specialty coffee, but it used an astonishing and perhaps unsustainable amount of water.

  Natural, or dry processing, was the more ancient process, believed to have originated in Yemen and still practiced there. As its name promises, it involves no water. The cherries would be dried on flat beds, usually some kind of latticework like a metal screen, and when dry, they were hulled—run through a rudimentary machine to remove all the layers from the bean. Because the beans weren’t washed, they retained some of the mucilage, and because the beans spent more time inside the fruit absorbing its flavors, dry processing resulted in a fruitier but far less predictable taste. For generations this has been both the bane and boon of Yemeni coffee—it could be either wonderfully rich or of such rough quality that its merits were obscured.

  After the beans were processed, they were bagged and left to rest. They needed to rest, Mokhtar learned, because the processing was traumatic for the fruit—traumatic for the fruit!—and after such a traumatic process, they needed time to recover. They were still alive, remember, Mokhtar was told. They were seeds, remember. They could still produce a coffee plant. So the resting period can last anywhere between three and six months. Farmers who weren’t so quality conscious would store their beans for far longer and still produce decent enough coffee, but most experts agree that storage shouldn’t last more than a year—beans should be roasted within a year of harvest.

  But first they needed to be sorted.

  In almost all cases, in all farms or processing plants, there are rows and rows of human beings, usually women, who hand-sort the beans. Their task is simple but labor intensive: they take piles of beans, hundreds of individual beans, and painstakingly remove any that are defective. A bad bean, experts say, can be just like a rotten apple—it could spoil the entire batch.

  What constitutes a defective bean? Often the defects were obvious. Some beans were broken. These fragments needed to be removed. Some beans were rotten. Or they’ve fermented. Or they were sour. Usually the flawed ones were obvious. The sorters, sitting at tables or desks, took pile after pile of the beans, and removed the offending beans. This process took days, and involved a level of concentration and care that would surprise the billions of coffee drinkers who assume that beans are beans—that they were all thrown together, all roasted together. But with a startling attention to detail and a commitment to uniformity, humans actually picked and chose each bean.

  Then there was shipping. The sorted green beans were labeled and packed and shipped. At Blue Bottle, Mokhtar learned the packing and shipping of the specialty coffee variety, where each harvest was carefully recorded and exported in smaller quantities—measured in kilos, not tons. In specialty coffee, the farm was known. The growers were known. Bags featured the name of the country, the region—Antigua, Guatemala, for example. Then the variety: for example, Bourbon, Typica. Often they named the farm and the farmer—a level of intimacy and information akin to wine or fine cheese.

  These bags, then, were sent to roasters. Blue Bottle was a roaster. Royal Grounds was a roaster. Intelligentsia was a roaster. These were the individuals or companies—roasters could be large or small, multinationals or microscopic hobbyists—that took the raw green beans and heated them until they resembled the beans we associate with coffee.

  For the last century or so, what most people knew about roasting was that it was done to coffee, and the French did it one way while the Italians did it some other way. At Blue Bottle, though, Mokhtar could see it actually being done in front of him—in gigantic machines from Germany that belched heat and needed constant tending. The roasters would drop the beans from a chute into a large drumlike oven, where they were continuously rotated and churned to ensure that they were baked equally on all sides. But were all beans roasted the same way? Not at all. All beans were different. But in all cases, it was considered anathema to overroast the beans.

  A good coffee should be roasted gently, in small batches, and lightly. A dark roast hid the greatness of a coffee, or steamrolled it, much like burning a steak would ruin a good cut of meat. Roasted coffee had more than eight hundred different aroma and taste components, and bringing out any respectable amount of these required the skill of an artisan. Mokhtar watched the Blue Bottle roasters do this, and the process reminded him of watching a great chef or glassblower—work requiring artistry and precision, but also the manipulation of fire, of valves and levers. And it all lasted a few minutes. The average roast only took ten minutes, and every second was crucial. Periodically, in the middle of a roast, the roaster would remove a few beans, checking the color, the size, the cracks. It was an intense few minutes, and as often as not, the roaster, even after all that, would think he or she could have done it better. Ideally, the roasted beans then were allowed to rest. They reach their flavor peak three days after roasting, and after seven, they begin to decline. Grinding the coffee three days after roasting is ideal, and it’s best to brew it immediately after grinding.

  Everywhere along the line there were people involved. Farmers who planted and monitored and cared for and pruned and fertilized their trees. Pickers who walked among the rows of plants, in the mountains’ thin air, taking the cherries, only the red cherries, placing them one by one in their buckets and baskets. Workers who processed the cherries, most of that work done by hand, too, fingers removing the sticky mucilage from each bean. There were the humans who dried the beans. Who turned them on the drying beds to make sure they dried evenly. Then those who sorted the dried beans, the good beans from the bad. Then the humans who bagged these sorted beans. Bagged them in bags that kept them fresh, bags that retained the flavor without adding unwanted tastes and aromas. The humans who tossed the bagged beans on trucks. The humans who took the bags off the trucks and put them into containers and onto ships. The humans who took the beans from
the ships and put them on different trucks. The humans who took the bags from the trucks and brought them into the roasteries in Tokyo and Chicago and Trieste. The humans who roasted each batch. The humans who packed smaller batches into smaller bags for purchase by those who might want to grind and brew at home. Or the humans who did the grinding at the coffee shop and then painstakingly brewed and poured the coffee or espresso or cappuccino.

  Any given cup of coffee, then, might have been touched by twenty hands, from farm to cup, yet these cups only cost two or three dollars. Even a four-dollar cup was miraculous, given how many people were involved, and how much individual human attention and expertise was lavished on the beans dissolved in that four-dollar cup. So much human attention and expertise, in fact, that even at four dollars a cup, chances were some person—or many people, or hundreds of people—along the line were being taken, underpaid, exploited.

  CHAPTER XV

  THE C MARKET AND THE THREE WAVES

  THE PROBLEM, MOKHTAR REALIZED, was the C market. Coffee was a commodity, and the price paid for the vast majority of the coffee harvested and sold worldwide was dictated by what the C market said coffee was worth. If the C market announced that coffee was going for one dollar a pound, then that price drove what farmers anywhere—from Guatemala to Rwanda to Vietnam—could charge for their crop. Of course, the farmer himself isn’t receiving that one dollar. That’s the final price paid by the conglomerates—Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, Philip Morris and Sara Lee—that buy 40 percent of the world’s coffee. The average small farmer in, say, Colombia might actually sell his coffee for thirty cents a pound. And not to the conglomerates directly. No, first he might sell his crop to a loan shark—a local broker who lends the farmers money until harvest, essentially keeping the farmers in perpetual debt. The loan sharks mix and bundle the crops of dozens of small farmers, and sell their aggregate to regional brokers. These brokers operate throughout Colombia, buying the crops from dozens to hundreds of small farms, consolidating them all into one undifferentiated mass called, for example, Colombian Coffee. The brokers will then sell this hulking regional bounty to an international conglomerate for the commodity price.

  This system was initiated in coffee’s first wave, a period in which Hills Bros. was instrumental. During the first wave, coffee exploded in popularity, became a multibillion-dollar business subject to all the benefits and liabilities of mass production. Vacuum packing made it easier to keep coffee fresh and to bring it to far-flung places but further distancing the customer from the roaster. Satori Kato, a Japanese American, patented instant coffee in 1903, allowing Nestlé, Maxwell House and Folgers to market coffee more as a caffeine-delivery product than a foodstuff of any sensory quality. Mass-produced coffee was cheap but it tasted wretched, with consumers forced to add sugar and milk and countless other after-market codicils to make it tolerable.

  Coffee’s second wave was a reaction to the downward spiral of coffee prices and quality. In the 1960s, Alfred Peet opened a small coffee roastery and coffee shop in Berkeley, California, where he refocused attention on where the beans had come from and how they were best roasted. A cup of coffee at Peet’s was more expensive than at the diner down the street, but it was far superior. Customers caught on, made Peet’s a success, and enabled other entrepreneurs, including Howard Schultz of Starbucks, to expand the reach of coffee’s second wave. Like Peet, Schultz was a socially conscious businessman, and made an effort not just to highlight where his coffee had come from, but to pay these farmers better, too. As Starbucks grew to a global phenomenon and emphasized the social space of a café—sometimes over the coffee itself—many in the coffee world wanted to return yet again to a grassroots, artisanal approach to roasting and brewing, where the emphasis would be squarely on the coffee itself.

  The third wave of coffee began. Third-wave roasters were usually independently owned and operated, not chains. They highlighted the origins of their coffee not only by country or region, but by the actual farms where the coffee came from. The names of the farmers. The soil, altitude and shade factoring into the taste of that coffee. They roasted their beans on the premises and brewed those beans promptly. They preferred the pour-over method, one cup at a time, giving each cup a handmade, one-of-a-kind specificity not unlike a customer would get while sipping a new Cabernet at its winery of origin.

  —

  And the comparison to wine was, Mokhtar knew, the key to making the third wave work. When a contemporary patron at a restaurant wanted wine, they asked for a wine list. On the list were not just types of wines—Cabernet, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay—but dozens of choices for each. A discerning customer might want not just a Malbec, not just a Malbec from Argentina, but a Malbec from Vines of Mendoza winery in the Uco Valley, where the soil and water and higher elevation were considered ideal for the cultivation of this velvety red. Because wine had long benefited from this level of specificity and customer erudition, winemakers had more control over what they could charge. If they made a high-quality wine, they could charge a premium for it. Thus winemaking became something of a meritocracy, something coffee wasn’t, given its shackling, since 1882, to commodity pricing.

  The third wave offered to free farmers from the C market. There might be a farmer in Ethiopia who had, for twenty years, been subject to dollar-a-pound commodity pricing—a rate that kept him and his employees in poverty. But if that farmer managed to create an exceptional coffee, he or she might enter it into a regional or global competition, and if that coffee was highly rated, he or she could get the attention of a third-wave roaster, like Chicago’s Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea or Stumptown Coffee Roasters in Portland. And then something extraordinary could happen. They could trade directly.

  Just as the third wave built on the crucial work of the second wave, so did direct trade advance from the important work of those advocating for fair trade. While fair-trade advocates had made great strides in ensuring that the products consumed by the first world were not made by exploited humans in the developing world, direct trade took it a step further. When that Ethiopian coffee farmer trades directly with the roasters from Intelligentsia, all the pitfalls of commodity pricing fall away. All the unknowns were eliminated. The roaster might travel to that Ethiopian farm, meet its owners and staff and pickers, inspect the trees and processing plant and see with his or her own eyes what they’re buying. If the quality was high, and the business practices sound, then the roaster and producer could agree on a price with no interference from loan sharks, brokers, international conglomerates or the C market. The direct-trade roaster invariably will pay more than the Ethiopian farmer has sold his beans for in the past. Freed from the merciless will of the global market, the farmer might sell his coffee for three dollars a pound, ten dollars a pound, twenty. There are rare varietals from all over the world—from El Salvador, Hawaii, Panama—that sell for forty dollars a pound. The effect was immediate and profound. If, through direct trade, the farmer gets a dollar more per pound, the transaction has radically changed the farmer’s life and the lives of his pickers and staff. If the farmer gets forty times the commodity rate, then what had been a break-even endeavor becomes a profession—and everyone involved could live with dignity and pride.

  The last step was convincing the customer to pay for it. A customer accustomed to a two-dollar cup of coffee will startle at the idea of paying five dollars for a cup of direct-trade Ethiopian coffee. But if the customer knows that five dollars is the actual price that cup of coffee should be—the correct price to ensure that everyone involved in bringing that cup of coffee into existence is being treated humanely and given a chance to live with dignity—would that customer balk or step up?

  —

  Mokhtar thought about the difference this could make in Yemen. In Yemen, he knew, coffee was so labor intensive, and was sold so cheap—mostly to brokers and loan sharks bringing it to Saudi Arabia by land—that it was nearly unworkable for any Yemeni farmer. Years ago, most farmers had forgone their coffee for qat. T
hough it needed more water, qat was far more profitable, and most of it was consumed within Yemen. There were fewer people involved in the trade, and the business was simple. Make qat in Yemen, sell qat in Yemen.

  The only way Mokhtar could revive coffee in Yemen, then, was to raise the price paid for Yemeni coffee above that paid for qat. To do that, he had to deal directly with the farmers, and determine a price based on what he could get from international specialty roasters. And to garner a higher price from these specialty roasters, he had to drastically raise the quality of Yemeni coffee cultivation. And he had to begin without having set foot on a Yemeni coffee farm.

  CHAPTER XVI

  THE PLAN

  PART II

  NOW MOKHTAR HAD A new plan. A plan far better and more focused than the ghetto version he’d presented to Ghassan. He wrote this new version up, with the heading MONK OF MOCHA. He still hadn’t changed the name and hadn’t decided how to spell Mocha. But conjuring a new name was on his list. He had a lot to do.

  “Vision: To empower Yemeni coffee farmers with the knowledge and tools to bring positive changes in the quality of their coffee and life.”

  He’d seen some business plans, and they usually started with that—the Vision summarized in one sentence. Anything more than one sentence was deemed unfocused. After Vision, the Mission allowed more elaboration. He wrote:

  “Mission: To create an economically viable and sustainable coffee company in Yemen with the purpose of improving the quality, consistency and production of coffee beans which will be the vehicle for changing the lives of the growers and producers through high ethical standards and socially conscious business practices.

  “Core Values:

  - “Putting the farmer first

  - Honesty and transparency