Mocha: From The World's First Coffee Lovers To Yemen's Civil War
Originally Published: 24 August 2020
The rise and fall of the world's sole supplier of coffee for 150 years in the backdrop of how a man managed to escape Yemen's Civil War with two suitcases full of coffee.
Mocha. The union of melted chocolate sauce and bold espresso, topped with a layer of velvety cream. This popular coffeehouse order is named after a port city in Yemen. Didn't see that coming did you?
The Monk of Mokha' by Dave Eggers, is a biography of a young Yemeni American man named Mokhtar Alkhanshali. His experiences are common to those from muslim immigrant families living in the US; the racist comments and the unwarranted security checks. Mokhtar (as Eggers refers to him as) grows up in a rather rough neighbourhood and finds it difficult to hold down a job when he grows older. His hopes of ever attending law school fade before his eyes and he ends up working as a doorman at a hotel in San Francisco. Near this hotel, stands a giant statute, initially unnoticed by Mokhtar.
A 20ft high statute depicts - what Mokhtar realised was- a Yemeni monk. The monk wears a turban, draped in a robe, drinking a cup of coffee. The statue is officially known as "The Taster" and stands in Hills Bros. Plaza. Hills Bros. Coffee was the first company to use vaccum packaging for ground coffee, making it easily sold in grocery stores. The Yemeni monk appeared on the company's first vaccum sealed packaging and has been a mascot ever since.
Learning that his lineage can be traced back to the world's first coffee farmers, Mokhtar finds his calling and returns to Yemen. Mokhtar hopes to revive Yemen's coffee glory and bring back Yemeni coffee samples to the US.
THE ORIGINAL COFFEE LOVERS
Sufi monks in Yemen were amongst the world's first coffee drinkers, consuming the caffeinated beverage to stay awake during night prayers. It's worth noting that the word 'monk' is used for convenience purposes; these religious Sufi men can't exactly be classified as monks in the traditional sense as unlike monks from other religious sects, they still got married and had families. Thus, using the psychoactive substance to concentrate during night prayers, away from responsibilities, made coffee ever more valuable.
The word 'mocha' originates from the arabic noun Al-Makha (or Al-Mokha), which refers to a port city, located on the Red Sea coast of Yemen. It is believed that the world's first cup of coffee was brewed in the Port of Mokha by the Sufi, Ali Ibn Omar al-Shadhili, around 1400AD. In 'Coffee: A Global History', historian Jonathan Morris mentions how Ali Ibn Omar al-Shadhili was the first person in recorded history to be associated with coffee.
It appears that the Sufis were the first coffee lovers in history, as exemplfied by Ali Ibn Omar Al-Shadhili's Sufi poem written in the 14th century:
Oh coffee,
Oh story of lovers,
You help me repel my sleep,
You help me stay awake and worship my lord while people fell asleep.
Don’t blame me for my intense love for coffee.
It is the drink of the righteous people.
The word 'righteous' has symbolic meaning because the Yeminis called this treasured beverage 'qahwa', which means wine in arabic. The English words 'coffee' and 'cafe' derive from 'qahwa'. Since Islam forbids alcohol consumption, 'qahwa' became known as 'the wine of Arabia' in Europe.
THE PORT OF MOCHA
If you give 'The Taster' statute a google search, you may find sources suggesting it was erected to honour coffee's Ethiopian roots. This is because there are overlapping claims on the origins of coffee and coffee drinking between Ethiopia and Yemen. There are several versions on the origins of coffee, most of which are legends and should not be taken as historical fact. You may come across the story of Kaldi and the dancing goats in Ethiopia. I believe everyone deserves to have their narrative heard- even goats- so I don't wish to brush up on this caffeinated history but the short version is that Kaldi- a shepard- saw his goats dancing one day and realised that they had been chewing on coffee cherries, after which they became wildly energised. If you dig deeper into this legend, you'll find several different versions. Such conflicting accounts are inevitable when oral history is involved.
While the origins of coffee remain unclear, most believe coffee was first grown in Ethiopia and made its way to Yemen, which become the first country to cultivate coffee, hosting the world's first coffee farms.
In his book 'All About Coffee'. William H. Ukers writes that coffee cultivation in Yemen dates can be traced back to "575 A.D., when the Persian invasion put an end to the Ethiopian rule of the negus Caleb, who conquered the country in 525." Jonathan Morris also mentions in his book that until the 1540s, coffee could only be found in Ethiopia but "rising demand and unreliable supplies due to conflicts between the African empire's Christian north and Muslim south led to coffee being cultivated in the highlands of the Yemeni interior between the coastal plain of Tihama and the capital city of Sana'a."
Grown in the highlands, Yemeni coffee has characteristic chocolatey flavours. To replicate this distinctive taste, "coffee houses would add chocolate to drinks brewed from beans of other origins" according to the 'Port of Mokha' website. This explains why the 'mocha' you order at Starbucks contains chocolate. Anda Greeney- a Harvard researcher who studies Yemen’s coffee sector- suggests that "the first recorded reference of mixing coffee and chocolate comes from a Betty Crocker recipe of a “Mocha Cake” with a coffee frosting, using mocha coffee dated from 1892."
For 150 years, the port of Mocha was the sole supplier of coffee in the world writes Anthony Wild. In order to maintain this monopoly, the Yemenis refused to sell live coffee plants or seeds. Wild mentions that the Yemenis reportedly boiled or even partly roasted their green coffee beans to prevent germination. Wild notes that while this may well be conjecture, what is clear is that the beans were so safely guarded that "fines were imposed if traders were caught attempting to smuggle them out, it is probable that the spurious story of sterilizing the beans was circulated to discourage smuggling." However, the port of Mocha would eventually see the end of its glory days as colonised territories started to produce coffee at a larger scale. According to Wild, the Dutch established successful coffee plantations on their colony of Java (in Indonesia) in 1699.
The Mocha trade vanished without much historical recognition. As Jonathan Morris states in his book, "Today the harbour area of Mocha houses a small fishing fleet and many ruins, and is approached through silted-up channels, supposedly the consequence of nineteenth-century American ships discharging their ballast prior to taking coffee on board."
Most people know what a mocha is but are surprised upon learning that Yemen- a country devastated by war- began the coffee trade.
YEMEN'S CIVIL WAR
At 3:00 AM on March 26th 2015, Mokhtar awoke to a bombing. Several bombings. From the roof of where he slept that night, he saw Raj Attan Mountain on fire. David Eggers writes, "He tried to sleep. He counted the air strikes. Fifty, sixty. He lost track at eighty." Both civilian airports had been bombed, the US embassay shut down- with no evacuation plan for American citizens in Yemen.
Mokhtar planned to leave the country by boat. On the way to Aden port, him and his companions were kidnapped by popular committee members- armed groups of Yemeni tribes volunteering as soldiers to fight against the Houthis. They had rifles pointed at them and Mokhtar's companion almost got assassinated at one point. Just as he's about to escape this real-life thriller, Mokhtar asks one of the popular committee members (also called Mokhtar) to retrieve his two suitcases full of coffee samples. Upon reflection, Mokhtar realises his absurd sense of priority. But he managed it. As the Sufi monk would say "Don’t blame me for my intense love for coffee."
In a spur of historical artistic expression, Mokhtar escapes the civil war through none other than: The Port of Mocha. Sailing across the Red Sea on a boat to Djibouti, his caffeinated heroic act is captured through the logo of the coffee company he later goes on to form. A sailing boat represents his company 'Port of Mokha', selling a single cup of coffee for $16 at Blue Bottle. His company is still functioning despite the COVID-19 outbreak and also ships its coffee beans internationally.
Mocha witnessed the origins of the coffee trade. Watching over the Red Sea, Mocha witnessed the rise and fall of empires. As the years went by, Mocha witnessed the decline of its coffee glory.
Today, Mocha witnesses the largest humanitarian crisis in the world.