Just a few years ago, San Francisco native Mokhtar Alkhanshali was working as a doorman. Today, he's still opening doors, but this time as the leader behind Port of Mokha, a coffee company unlike any other.
Taking his family's own Yemeni heritage as inspiration, Alkhanshali turned his passion into a project that would change — and risk — his life. Alkhanshali was on a business trip to Yemen in 2015 when "overnight, the country went to war," and the U.S. offered no evacuation strategy for Americans trapped there. After a daring escape, Alkhanshali went — almost directly — to a coffee conference in Seattle, with beans he'd carried in his suitcase.
Today, Port of Mokha coffee is a thriving business, and Alkhanshali's foundation is transforming lives for the workers who cultivate the coffee beans back in Yemen. Alkhanshali's remarkable story has served as inspiration for author Dave Eggers, who's turned the larger-than-life tale into "The Monk of Mokha," a new book about hope, resilience and the power of a good brew to bring people together.
Salon spoke to Alkhanshali via phone earlier this month about his journey, and his new role as a literary protagonist.
You have a really strong commitment to encouraging females in your business.
Well, especially in Yemen, 75 percent of farmers are women. I think, globally, in the world of coffee, the future is with women. When I first started working, it was mostly men. It was very stagnant quality. One of the first things that I did was I initiated that half of the members had to be women in the cooperatives. The quality literally changed overnight.
You hadn’t even had a really a single-origin cup of coffee until five years ago. Is that right?
Absolutely. It’s funny how something small can have a huge butterfly effect that changes your life. As I started researching and learning this amazing history of coffee, I walked into a coffee shop. It was Blue Bottle right in SF. This coffee was was $4.75, which I thought at the time was very expensive for a cup of coffee. I drank it right away. It tasted like blueberries and honeysuckle, and it had this very sweet, lingering aftertaste. I didn’t know that coffee could taste like that. I started talking to the barista. In my case, it was a very nice barista. What really stuck to me was that he said how how because of their direct relationship with the producing community, that the farmers have this quality of life. To be able to use coffee as a vehicle for social impact, I was like, “I want to do something with this.”
I’m not going to lie to you and pretend that I had this epic business model plan. I don’t have an MBA. But I felt that this was my calling more than a career. I took this leap of faith and I went. I made a lot of mistakes, and still do. Luckily, I had really good teachers.
You were someone who had been waiting and watching and wondering what to do, and then it started to click into place. That this was also tied to your childhood memories, it's like you found not just your future but your past in this.
I felt that moment I had that cup of coffee is that moment that my past and future collided, and it took me on this journey. Also, for me, it’s like knowing where you come from to help you understand where you’re going in your life. Knowing my history as a kid picking coffee cherries with my grandmother, or my ancestors who were the first to pick this coffee drink and make it, it definitely had an impact on me.
I didn’t know when I went into this book this role that Yemen plays in this thing that billions of us consume every single day of our lives.
It is amazing, this port of Mokha. That’s a city in Yemen, a port, and that changed the world. It was what fueled Europe’s enlightenment. The coffee houses that came out in London, Vienna, Paris, where all these amazing ideas flourished, was because of this fuel called coffee. I always tell people that oil powers factory’s machines, and coffee powers human dreams, and I mean it. I think the book really does a good job telling about the importance of direct trading, and why as consumers we have such an important role to play in how we impact the world.
You came into this business with so much heart and curiosity of learning the craft, of learning the business, and you went to Yemen and it was not a coffee capital in the world at all. You can’t really get coffee because the chief product at that point is something else.
Yeah, this thing called qat, this drug that picks up 32 percent of Yemen’s water resources. It’s to the point where the capital of Yemen is poised to be the first city to run out of water as early as this year. For every one coffee farm, there are seven of these drug farms. My idea was if I can get coffee to star quality, I can find the right buyers and I can have people be paid more in Yemen. That way they will have it as an alternative. That was my dream and what I was focused on.
Then, you wound up having to make this escape. I was also surprised reading about this moment because I didn’t know that the United States wasn’t helping people get out, wasn’t helping people like you.
Other countries, like India and China and Russia, were taking out hundreds of people. The state department just told me, “We can’t help you right now. What we can do is we relay your messages to your loved ones via our website.” I felt abandoned. It was hurtful. We even had a website called stuckinyemen.org, where several hundred Americans who were stuck there signed up. I really needed to attend this conference, so I had to take things into my own hands. When you’re in that situation, you don’t have many options. I took that leap of faith, went on that boat and, well, I’m here with you.
Then you went back to the U.S. and you were the toast of Seattle, pretty much the next day.
When I got to the airport in Seattle, I was in the Uber going to the conference and I heard myself on the BBC Radio. It was so surreal. I remember the Uber driver was like, “This guy is pretty amazing just helping these farmers, but he’s crazy.”
I was like, “Yeah, he’s nuts.” It was unbelievable. The coffee, it had the highest score in world in blind tastings. That was something that meant a lot because I wanted people to respect the work of the farmers, because in this blind tasting, no one knows where the coffees are from.
In your business, your enterprise and also the foundation, you are really making this about a product that you care about. But it’s not just a product because it’s tied to the soil, it’s tied to people’s lives. How do you do that?
I think storytelling is the most powerful medium that exists. When you talk about coffee, you can talk about varietals, elevation, but that's not a story. I think my story is one that talks about coffee, a kid who had a dream. And different people, I hope, can find themselves in it.
It is also because food and drink are the things we share with each other. There’s the communion of harvesting the food, of cultivating it. Then, there’s the communion of experiencing it together.
Absolutely. It crosses borders, and cultures. What would connect a farmer from the northwestern mountains of Yemen with someone from Bushwick, beside the beards? I think coffee is such a powerful force to build bridges. We’ve been in a rat race, always running around. I think coffee is about slowing down, and being present, and understanding that it’s an experience, not just the effects of caffeine that you want to take in for your busy day. I always tell people the shortest distance between two people is a cup of coffee.
In any industry, when you buy something you have an opportunity to uplift someone or exploit them. When decide to go cheap on things, someone will pay the consequence of that.
Going through everything you’ve gone through, you must have had moments where you thought, “You know what, no, I think maybe I need to do something else.”
At the beginning, it was a lot of fake-it-till-you-make-it for me.
Any entrepreneur, it’s not easy. You’re finding yourself in these little hard moments, arguing my decisions. I think you would just stick close to your principles, your vision, and what you want. Your passion, that’s the only thing that can keep you going. It will help you move mountains, and cross oceans. It helped me cross my ocean. But otherwise, when things get rough and things don’t make sense, if you don’t have some passion inside of you, you won’t be able to keep pushing.
We are now at this moment in our culture, in our country, where we are also talking about trying to build connections. We’re also talking about building walls. We’re also, as an administration, targeting specific groups of people from specific countries, whether or not they pose a threat to the United States. This is very personal for you.
It is. Some friends of mine have a company called the Department of Brewology and they have this poster that says, “Filter coffee, not people.”
I have family members who are stuck in countries like Djibouti, and Egypt, and Jordan. You have bombs that are being dropped in Yemen, but they're not made in Saudi Arabia, they're made in the U.S. But I think my story is a unifying narrative in these divided times, and we need to push back against all the hate and divisiveness. This is very personal. I hope that people can see something in the book that reminds them of our humanity, and when they buy that cup of coffee, they’ll look at that journey that it took to get to them and they can honor those farmers, and the baristas and the roasters. I think we should definitely build bridges, not walls.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
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