The tales behind that coffee in yourcup
SHEILA DILLON Where The Wild Coffee Grows: The Untold Story Of Coffee From The Cloud Forests Of Ethiopia To Your Cup Jeff Koehler Bloomsbury €27
The statistics on what is the not-quite-yetfavourite drink in Ireland are astonishing. One third of consumers here buy at least one takeway coffee a day and most are willing to spend as much as €3 a cup, once it tastes great. Sales of instant coffee are declining as a third of our population now owns a coffee-pod machine and sales of coffee here are predicted to rise to €176m by 2020. All this in a nation so committed to cheap food that a good number of people were happy to buy packs of frozen hamburgers for less than an Americano and were then surprised to find they contained horse meat. Talk about improving your wellbeing by buying more vegetables or better quality meat and bread and you’ll be shouted down as an elitist. But €3 for a coffee? Perfectly normal.
All such reflections come up in a surprisingly absorbing book that really hasn’t much to say about coffee rip-offs on the high street. Jeff Koehler wants us to understand where coffee comes from, what it means and how it spread all around the world in astonishingly different ways involving an unlikely cast of characters including Louis XIV (a coffee enthusiast), the poet Arthur Rimbaud (a pioneering coffee trader) and the Danish writer Karen Blixen (a coffee farmer).
Only two species of coffee are grown commercially: Arabica and Robusta. Robusta is coarse stuff used mostly in cheaper ground blends and instant. Arabica is what the world’s tastes were weaned on. And it has nothing to do with Arabia — the name was a mistake by the 18th-century Swedish botanist and plant classifier Carl Linnaeus.
Coffee had been classified as a laurel, but Linnaeus rejected that and created a new genus, Coffea, and in describing it wrote: ‘It grows only in Felix Arabia [Yemen].’ Well, not so. Although Linnaeus corrected himself later, the common belief until just a few decades ago was that coffee originated in the Arab world. In fact, its wild beginnings were in the wet, high and shady forests of the Kaffa region of southwest Ethiopia.
Until the late 19th Century, when the emperor Menelik II brutally unified the country, Kaffa was a rich and isolated kingdom, trading in salt, iron, slaves and coffee. And it had a coffee culture like no other.
In the local language, the word for coffee is buno, meaning a gift for the king. Which says a lot about the sacredness that has always surrounded coffee in Ethiopia. It still produces the best coffee in the world and is the only serious coffee-producing country that drinks more of its own product than it exports.
Guide books to Ethiopia tell you about the country’s ‘coffee ceremony’ (green beans are roasted over a brazier before being ground and infused in a jebena clay pot), making it sound like some ethnic performance for keen tourists. In fact, as I discovered recording in Addis Ababa and all over the Rift Valley, the half-hour ‘ceremony’ – about as far removed from the coffee-pod machine as you can imagine – is just the way coffee is commonly made there.
It all makes for a great story – and a more fascinating backdrop to our coffee-pod faux-cappuccino culture than I ever imagined.
GILES MILTON
The Monk Of Mokha Dave Eggers Hamish Hamilton €21
Here’s another book that Donald Trump will hate. Indeed, it’s tempting to imagine how he might review it on Twitter. ‘The story of a Yemeni-American entrepreneur – Fake News! A failure of US foreign policy – Sad!!!’
With The Monk Of Mokha, it’s almost as if Dave Eggers is writing the antidote to Trumpism, for this is a book that celebrates ethnic diversity and the exuberance of the human spirit. At the same time, it exposes the many failings of contemporary America, including its downtrodden underclass.
Eggers has written a number of bighitting books, his most famous being A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius – a memoir that raced to No.1 on the New York Times bestseller list.
This latest non-fiction book is also a memoir of sorts – a global story wrapped up in a deeply personal saga.
The origins of coffee and one man’s hair-raising attempts to import it to America – two richly flavoured books to pore over with a cuppa ‘His trials are terrifying, kidnap, aerial bombs and near execution before his final escape’
At its heart At its heart is Mokhtar Alkhanshali, a young American of Yemeni origin, who wants to make something of his life. The cards are stacked firmly against him. He comes from an impoverished family, is poorly educated and lives in the violent, drug-ridden district of Tenderloin, San Francisco. He drifts through a succession of unskilled jobs, among them doorman and car salesman. But when he discovers that some believe Yemeni coffee beans are the best in the world, he throws all his energy into establishing a coffee-importing business. His idea is to transport beans from the wild mountains of his family homeland to American cafés. He knows nothing about coffee and even less about how businesses function. Undeterred, he throws himself into his project with gritty determination.
Eggers’s book is, in part, about the American Dream and the ability of impoverished Americans to lift themselves from penury. But The Monk Of
Mokha is also rooted in the chaotic violence of the Arabian peninsula, where much of the action takes place.
The Yemen to which Mokhtar travels in 2015 is rapidly descending into turmoil. Houthi rebels have seized control of great swathes of land, prompting the Saudis to start indiscriminate bombing from the air. On the ground, struggling to save his fledgling coffee business, is 24-year-old Mokhtar.
His trials are terrifying: kidnap, aerial bombs and near execution and his final escape takes place in a tiny skiff, crossing the pirate-infested Red Sea.
But does he succeed? The outcome of his Yemeni adventure is only revealed at end of the book, a climax that’s deeply touching. One thing is sure: Mokhtar returned to San Francisco in the nick of time. If he’d left it much later, he’d have fallen foul of Trump’s Muslim travel ban.
His American Dream would have ended as a Yemeni nightmare.