That’s me sitting on a mountain of coffee bags in a moment I can only describe as pure bliss. The date is December 27th, 2014, Timothée Chalamet’s birthday. He was probably having a good day too.
See, this photo was taken after spending the better part of two years pursuing a career in coffee. When I get into something, I go headfirst, I don’t know any other way to be. In 2013 I came upon a statue in San Francisco of a Yemeni man holding a cup of coffee to the heavens. I had to understand what this was and where it came from. How did I miss this thing that had been right under my nose for so long? The inscription on the statue reads:
“Created by sculptor Spero Anargyros. The familiar bearded figure in turban and flowing robe logo was originally designed for Hills Bros. by a local San Francisco artist just before the turn of the century. In 1900, when Hills Bros. originated the process for vacuum-packing coffee, this trademark appeared on the first Hills Bros. vacuum-packed coffee can. It has lived on through all the years as a lasting symbol of coffee quality.”
I had to know more. Turns out, he’s supposed to be Yemeni. The statue is a kind of orientalist homage to coffee’s Eastern/Arab origins. This sent me on a journey which would eventually bring me to learn that Yemen is/was the greatest triumph and, perhaps, tragedy in the history of coffee.
Coffee culture began in Yemen with Sufi mystics who would use the beverage’s stimulating effects to stay up late in study and worship. From there it was commercialized and for centuries all the coffee that was consumed in the world was grown by free, land-owning farmers in the mountains of Yemen and was shipped from the Port of (you guessed it) Mokha.
And Yemeni coffee was/is amazing. Following the colonial proliferation of coffee in the Dutch East Indies, coffee grown on mega plantations by colonists using slave labor drove the cost of coffee down. With that, the natural delicious chocolatey flavor of coffee waned, likely due to monoculture and a phenomenon called "genetic bottleneck". Coffee shops began adding chocolate to their coffee to mimic the natural chocolatey taste of Yemen coffee, hence the term 'mocha'. This was incredible for me to learn so I eagerly set out to taste some of this amazing Yemeni coffee.
Unfortunately, I was met with disappointment.
Yemeni coffee, as I'd come to learn, had been in rapid decline due to a number of factors; political instability, cost, and the proliferation of ‘Qat’. A locally consumed stimulant that offers a faster and more consistent stream of income for farmers. For decades farmers had been ripping out their centuries-old coffee trees to replace them with qat in hopes of greater economic opportunity.
I couldn’t get my hands on an authentic Yemen, but one thing I heard consistently from several industry professionals and bonafide coffee veterans was that the best single origin they’d ever had was a Yemen. I had to find out for myself.
I left for Yemen full of zeal at the opportunity to find these hidden gems. I traveled to dozens of coffee farms all over. I began talking to farmers, collecting samples, making friends and learning more and more about Yemeni coffee along the way. I ended up with around twenty one samples and boarded a plane to the US where I’d meet up with my friend and mentor Willem Boot who would no-doubt roast and taste these incredible gems I returned with.
I was on top of the world, and right then was where I met my first major set-back. Out of the twenty one samples I brought, nineteen of them failed to meet basic specialty coffee requirements. As Willem said at the time, they were DOA (dead on arrival). But there was a glimmer of hope. Two of them were amazing. More than amazing. There were nineteen that were horrible, gag inducing, but two were ninety-plus. For those unfamiliar with this terminology, in essence this means not only is it good, it’s among the best coffees in the world. Very few coffees, even withing high end coffee establishments, score above niney points. This one did. What did that mean? It meant there was massive potential.
So I went back to Yemen and began the hard work of identifying problems within the supply chain, and working to train/build the infrastructure needed to fix those problems. One by one, farm by farm I attempted to convince farmers to change their methods and promised them in return that I would buy their coffee many multiples higher than they were accustomed to being paid. Many refused, but some brave ones decided to put their trust in me.
We moved fast and over the course of about five months we transformed these farms and one by one began collecting coffee lots that not only met specialty coffee standards but consistently achieved very high cupping scores.
The picture shown at the beginning of this post is me sitting atop the first batch of shipments from plthese coffees we had worked so hard to produce. Over the next three months, following that picture, I would continue collecting coffee until it was finally time to return to the US, attend the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) annual expo and show our coffees to the world. The expo was set to take place on April 14th and I was all geared up to have a nice trip to Seattle to attend.
There’s something I forgot to mention… I have a somewhat of a superpower you could say. When I’m focused on something, i’m pretty great at putting my head down and ignoring everything else going on around me. This superpower has served me very well in the past, but every once in a while the bill arrives, so to speak. See, during this exact same period of time I illustrated above, there was something else happening in Yemen. Here’s a simple spreadsheet to illustrate:
Date | Me | Yemen |
March, 2014 | I receive training in coffee production, farming, cupping, and supply chain QC with Willem Boot at Boot Coffee Campus in Marin County, California. | Protests and unrest increase against President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s government by the Houthis in Northern Yemen. |
May, 2014 | I return to Yemen to survey farms, meet farmers, and collect samples. | Houthi rebels gain significant ground in Northern Yemen and continued clashes with AQAP in central Yemen. |
August, 2014 | I return to the US to cup samples with Willem and discover most are below standard but two stood out as 90+ coffee. | Houthis begin organizing mass protests in Sana’a and other regions, demanding the resignation of the government and the reversal of fuel subsidy cuts by Hadi administration. |
September, 2014 | I return to Yemen to rush in onboarding farms in anticipation of November harvest. | Houthi rebel forces seize control of Yemen’s capital, Sana’a. |
December, 2014 | I begin collecting coffee for export in Port of Mokha HQ warehouse in Sana’a. | Houthis take over several gov’t institutions, consolidating power in Sana’a. |
So yeah… it’s not that I didn’t know these things were happening. And it’s not like I wasn’t worried about them. I just didn’t have the time to take them as seriously as I maybe should have. I had a mission, and as long as the world crumbling around me didn’t interfere too much, I was determined to just keep going. The three months following that first collection, we continued to collect coffee from all the farms we had intervened in. More and more coffee piled up. The next photo you see here was taken on March 28th, 2015. You might notice I'm a bit less ecstatic upon this new throne of coffee bags. Maybe I was tired from the unbelievable amount of sleepless days i’d spent working at that point, maybe it was just the morning (as the cup of coffee would indicate) and I had just woken up. Or maybe it’s because two days prior to this picture being taken, a regional coalition led by Saudi Arabia had begun bombing Yemen in order to depose the Houthis and reinstall the Hadi government. Probably the latter.
Two days following this picture being taken an airstrike landed so close to our facility that it blew in our aluminum roll up door in and knocked all my coffee cupping equipment to the ground. Following that, I knew it was time to go.
The SCA expo was in two weeks and if I was going to make it I had to leave then and there. By this time all flights into and from Yemen had been stopped and the US was refusing to evacuate their citizens (even though several, far less capable, countries by that point were.) I had heard about certain cargo ships leaving from the literal port of Mokha in the south and some people managing to board them and escape across the Red Sea. How poetic would that be? To leave from the very place where the coffee industry began. So I did, long story short I braved the insane drive from Sana’a to Mokha where we endured numerous checkpoints from at least four warring factions in Yemen, crazy roads, and shootouts. Despite all likelihood, we made it to the historic city of Mokha. I’m actually skipping a lot of stuff here for brevity’s sake, not the least of which when I got literally kidnapped. You can read about all of that in the Monk of Mokha if you’re so inclined, but anyway moving on…
When we arrived there we were told that the cargo ship (carrying onions) had no fuel and wasn’t leaving and there was no timeline as to when it would depart. Instead, we were told that we could take a smaller boat… a viper. Sounded pretty cool. It turned out, the person who told me this has said fiber, as in fiberglass. It was a tiny dingy. Not exactly ‘seaworthy’ as one might say. But I didn’t have a choice.
That’s me again, in the middle of the red sea, on a tiny fiberglass boat.
People always ask me why, why did I do it, what motivated me to get on that boat? For some reason my answer never seems to satisfy anyone. The truth is, I made a promise to these farmers that I would sell their coffee in America and at that point, there was no other way for me to fulfill that promise other than getting on that boat. One day you’re sitting atop a mountain, and the next day you’re carrying it on your back. I carried that mountain of coffee (figuratively) with me through checkpoints, shootouts, civil war, across a sea and then across the sky.
This last picture was the view out of the window on my way home. One day you’re in the sea, the next you’re in the sky.
I returned to the US and made it to SCA a week and a half later with a briefcase full of samples. As I've been told subsequently, the cuppings of those coffees became easily the biggest thing at the conference that year. We went on to sell coffees from that harvest/shipment to roasters across the US, most notably Blue Bottle who sold it at $16 per cup.
I’m far from the first to say this but life really is a series of ups and downs. And often the greater the high, the lower the subsequent low will be. It may take days, weeks, years, or hours/minutes for that pendulum to swing and we never ever know exactly when it will. Inevitably, despite our best efforts, and despite us somehow always convincing ourselves that the good (and bad) times will last forever, they never do. The tide goes in, and the tide goes out at an unpredictable pace until our final breaths. As one of my dear teachers would often say, “you can’t stop the waves from coming, but you can learn how to surf.”
My advice to myself and any of you reading this; learn to surf.
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