The Monk of Mokha
(Dave Eggers, 2018)
Coffee should not be enjoyed too hot, he says; it masks the flavor, and taste buds retreat from the heat.
Own the error and correct it.
Keep the money in your hand, never in your heart. It means that money is ephemeral, moving from person to person. It’s a tool. Don’t let it get into your heart or your soul.
Don’t you know Yemenis were the first to export coffee? Yemenis basically invented coffee.
Coffee was a fruit, from a tree, a tree that usually bloomed once a year, and inside each fruit was the coffee bean. And the two halves of the bean were what we typically saw — the tiny bean, oval and with a stripe of concavity down the middle. Two halves of a bean, wrapped inside a fleshy fruit the size of a grape.
There were two kinds of coffee robusta and arabica, but it was arabica that was considered far superior in taste, and it was called arabica because it was born in Arabia.
The coffee trade in Yemen was all but finished. Though Ethiopia had been home to the first coffee bush, and Yemen home to the first cultivation and organized coffee trade, in the last fifty years Ethiopia had come to dominate the region.
Now it was picked and stored without great care, and Yemeni coffee, though it was the world’s first ever cultivated, was known to be inferior to most or all other coffees in the world.
But Yemen, the region that had started the cultivation of the coffee plant in the first place, was now a tiny and largely ignored player in the world coffee market.
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.
Resting period can last anywhere between three and six months. Beans should be roasted within a year of harvest.
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.
Grinding the coffee three days after roasting is ideal, and it’s best to brew it immediately after grinding.
He had had a dream, and dreams are heavy things, requiring constant care and pruning.
If you believe there’s only one path to God, then you’re limiting God.
