The Monk of Mokha

interesting.

Al-Shadhili became known as the Monk of Mokha, and Mokha became the primary point of departure for all the coffee grown in Yemen and destined for faraway markets.

By eighteen, he knew these people, who had gone to college and could live wherever they wanted, had nothing he didn’t have. They weren’t any smarter, this was clear. They weren’t quicker. They weren’t even more ruthless. If anything, they were softer. But they had advantages. Or they had expectations. Or assumptions. It was assumed they’d go to col

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.

Mokhtar walked out of his captivity in bright camaraderie with his former jailers.

According to legend, it was in Mokha, a port city on the Yemeni coast, that the bean was first brewed. For centuries after Khaldi the shepherd had come and gone, Ethiopians chewed the beans and made weak tea from them, but it was Ali Ibn Omar al-Shadhili, a Sufi holy man living in Mokha, who first brewed the bean into a semblance of what we now rec

exertion.

They were being detained. Not in a hostile way. Not in a way that felt especially menacing—not yet at least. It was more like the disorganized and irrational detentions common at American airports, the kind of detention that came from the officers feeling they’d been confronted with something beyond their immediate comprehension, something too unus

Mokhtar had to get back to the United States. He needed to test the samples he’d collected—he planned to bring twenty-one lots home—and visit family and see about raising a few hundred thousand dollars so he could come back and actually buy the coffee, if any, that scored well.