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Dan here with another Sporkful Reheat for you.
And this one is part two of a two part story that we started last week and last Friday's reheat.
And this was an episode that many of you requested for a reheat.
So we're very happy to bring it to you.
It's a story of Mokhtar Al -Khanshali, an unlikely coffee entrepreneur.
When he left off, he was being held captive in a Yemeni prison as the country was erupting into full blown civil war.
Now, if you haven't heard part one yet, please go back and start there.
And remember, there's an episode of The Sporkful you want us to pull out of the deep freezer and reheat.
Drop me a line to hello at sporkful .com.
Thanks so much, and now here's part two of our story.
Previously on The Sporkful.
I would ask seasoned coffee buyers and roasters, where can I get Yemen coffee?
And they would say things like, it's just really hard to get.
We don't know where it comes from because we can't go to that country.
It's very expensive.
And it has a lot of defects.
But the best cup of coffee that I had was like a Yemen coffee 10 years ago or 20 years ago.
And I looked at Wollum.
He had this kind of Mona Lisa smile.
Like a very subtle smirk.
I was like, was that a smile?
I don't know. Maybe is it good?
Is it bad? I don't know.
It was so different.
He said, this is one of the best coffees I ever tasted.
I could feel like the earth shaking.
And I went outside.
And I saw what looked like laser beams being shot in the sky.
and those were anti -aircraft machine guns being shot out fighter jets this is the sporkful it's not for foodies it's for eaters i'm dan pashman each week on our show we obsess about food to learn more about people this is the second half of our two -part story about mokhtar al kanshali if you haven't listened to part one from last week please start there When we left off, Yemen was erupting in a full -blown war.
Mokhtar was trying to leave the country from the port of Aden.
And all I had with me are my coffee samples.
And I had $5 ,000 that I hid in my underwear and a .45 handgun.
Mokhtar needed to get out of Yemen alive and get those coffee samples to the big Specialty Coffee Association Expo in Seattle.
This was his chance to show the high -end coffee world that Yemeni coffee was incredible and that he had access to it.
He hired a driver and bodyguard, and they left for Aden.
When they got there, they were stopped by an armed group of resistance fighters who thought Mokhtar's driver and bodyguard were part of the conflict, fighting for the other side.
All three of them were blindfolded and taken to a local jail.
And it was a very difficult moment that I really can't speak a lot about, but I ended up...
At one point, I had my hands tied up behind my back and I was blindfolded, and someone told me they were going to kill me today.
And I just kept thinking about my family and like, why did I put myself in this position and like my whole life behind me and eventually go in this like disgusting jail cell with a lot of people who are mentally unstable.
But at that point they had bombed both airports and both seaports.
There was no way out the country.
But there were small shipments leaving from the port of Mocha to East Africa.
The port of Mocha is where coffee was first brewed by Sufi monks.
Coffee spread from there across the Arab world.
old. The story of the port of Mocha is how Mokhtar first learned that coffee came from Yemen.
It's how he got started on this journey.
Now, it might be his only chance.
And so in my head, I was like, wow, if I ever left this, you know, this prison, I'm going to go to this port.
But it was like a, it was a faraway fantasy.
I'm like, I'm like, you know, tied up right now.
And, you know, I don't know, I'm barefoot in this place where people are taking shits around me and like talking to themselves and saying, this was a very difficult place to be, They barely could breathe even.
What happened to your money and gun and coffee at this point?
Gun is with them. Coffee samples are with them.
They were in this Samsung bag.
And my money was still in my underwear.
No one had checked my underwear.
And so I had $5 ,000 in cash this whole time.
Over several hours, Mokhtar talked with his captors about who he was, his mission to help Yemeni coffee farmers, and why he was trying to leave Yemen.
Mokhtar was not a hostage negotiator.
He had never done anything like this before.
But he had learned a lot about how to deal with people, especially from his grandfather.
He would walk into a room and people would just stop talking and look at him.
And there was a way he looked because he always had something to say that was just different.
Typically, when you meet people in a room, you go and you shake each person's hand.
What he would do, he would slap people's hand and give high fives, you know, things like that.
I think one of the biggest lessons was grit.
You're going to be in very difficult positions.
and in those times it's easy to compromise on your values or easy to give up even.
And so he would say things like, you know, the person who's bravest in the last hour wins the war.
Mokhtar tried to channel his grandfather and kept talking to his captors.
Finally, he convinced them that he wasn't fighting for either side and he and his crew were released.
They had missed the ship out of Aden, but they decided to try to leave from the port of Mocha, a four -hour drive away.
They spent a night at a local hotel planning to leave in the morning.
But that night in the hotel, they had visitors.
In the middle of the night, they came in, six guys with their faces covered with guns and all holding AK -47s.
And that was scary because when people cover their faces, it's not a good sign.
They don't want you to see who they are because they might do something to you.
Mokhtar, his driver, and his bodyguard were captives once again.
These guys took Mokhtar's gun and coffee samples.
But Mokhtar was able to get in touch with Samar Nasser, the Yemeni -American woman who had told him about the ship in Aden.
She got a well -connected friend to come to the hotel, explain to the armed men who Mokhtar was, and get him and his crew freed.
They were about to leave the hotel when Mokhtar realized he needed something.
I said, okay, can you go get my coffee, my samples?
He's like, what? I'm like, no, no, I have a bag.
It's a black Samsonite bag, and I'm not going to leave without it.
He's like, what are you talking about?
The guys, they're like, hey, let's just escape now.
Now you forget about the samples.
I'm like, no, like we need those samples.
And I made them go and they took an hour and an hour at that time.
And you're hearing like bombing and you hear like howitzer shells coming around you.
And it was like, and my friend's like, what are you, we could have just left. He comes with my Samsung bag.
So this suitcase of samples held the product of two years of work.
And the reason why it was so important was because you wanted to get it to this trade show.
To show everybody how great Yemeni coffee could be.
And I had promised these farmers this dream.
You guys work on producing coffee and doing these new techniques and extra work.
And I will promise you I can find buyers for this coffee.
And so I couldn't let them down.
And that was like, you know, especially in a place like Yemen, hope is a very heavy burden to have. And if you give people hope, you just can't, it's something you have to be very mindful of.
And so I really wanted to figure out how I was going to make this promise happen.
And so in my head, I'm already thinking about the Port of Mocha.
I'm going to go to do this.
I get back. My family was like, thank God you're alive.
You know, forget about coffee.
My partners even, the investors were like, forget about the coffee project.
Just like stay safe.
But Mokhtar did not forget about the coffee, and he did not stay safe.
He had a trade show in Seattle to get to.
He went to the port of Mocha, but the ship he thought he would take was broken down.
He heard about a smaller boat headed to East Africa.
It's like a little 16 -foot dinghy with a little 40 -horsepower Yamaha motor on it.
And I'm like, are we going to be able to cross the ocean on this little thing?
And I realized, for me, I'm a very spiritual person and I believe in God.
And in these kind of situations, You really have to have something to believe in.
And I took, I got on that boat.
It was a few hours into the ride.
They were in the ocean.
We were like in the ocean.
Can you see land in any direction?
It's just like the waves are huge.
It got dark and it looked like Moby Dick.
It was just like, and I'm like, why am I doing this?
Like I could have, at least if I died in the land, I would have been buried.
Like I'm not going to die in sea.
My parents are going to like, you know, they're never going to find my body.
It was very scary. And I realized, you know, people who, you hear stories of migrants who take these ocean voyages you know off the coast of like North Africa to Italy or to like Greece from Syria and the stories of bodies that wash up you know and children and like you wonder what makes somebody what makes somebody do that why would they like risk their lives their family's lives to do that or even here in the U .S. like why would someone go through coyotes and through like these different smugglers to come from Mexico from Guatemala up here this is a poem by Orsan Shire he said no one leaves
land to go into the ocean unless the whole city is fleeing And so I really resonate with those people who take these journeys and risk their lives.
But in that journey, you know, I made it across.
We made it to East Africa, to Djibouti.
I get there and the ocean, the naval authorities come out with their guns and rifles.
They were smugglers.
I pull out my U .S. passport.
I told them I'm a U .S. citizen.
I have a coffee company or I'm trying to do a coffee thing.
And they're picking up my Samsonite bag, which is pretty heavy with coffee samples.
They open it up. I'm like, no, look, it's coffee beans.
They're not drugs. And they don't believe me.
No, they're like, there is drugs in here.
Coming up, Mokhtar finds himself imprisoned and separated from his coffee samples again.
Then later, he attempts to make his first sale in the world of specialty coffee.
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Welcome back to another Sporkful Reheat.
I'm Dan Pashman. Hey, if you want to hear what I'm eating and reading every week, you should sign up for the Sporkful newsletter.
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There's literally no downside.
Sign up right now at sporkful .com slash newsletter.
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Again, that's sporkful .com slash newsletter.
Thanks. Now back to the story of Mokhtar al -Khanshali.
He made it across the Red Sea from Yemen to the East African nation of Djibouti.
But the Navy there assumed he was a drug smuggler and arrested him.
And I'm in jail, and I have still my $5 ,000 in my underwear.
And so I took $100 out, and I gave it to one of the guards.
I said, hey, can you give me a SIM card for my phone?
He gives me a SIM card. And the iPhone SIM cards, they're these smaller mini SIMs. This was a giant SIM card. It didn't fit.
And so I'm like, crap.
So I'm there in the cell, I'm bored.
I put my SIM card on it from Yemen and I start to cut up around this giant Djiboutian SIM card. Mokhtar took his Yemeni SIM card, which fit in his phone but wouldn't get service in Djibouti.
He laid it on top of the big SIM card that the guard gave him and cut the big one down to the size of the small one, the one that did fit.
This was just for fun, just for like, you know, let me just, for, I don't know why.
and I did this thing and I had it for a couple of hours and I decided to try to stick it into my phone why the heck not and I stuck it in and it worked and I like totally MacGyver'd this thing and if you ever get these SIM cards you just gotta make sure it fits into your phone if you're ever stuck in a Djibouti prison your SIM card doesn't work this is the trick if you take one thing from this episode while all this was happening in Djibouti a lot was also happening back in America.
Mokhtar's family and friends had been pressuring the U .S. government to get Mokhtar out of Yemen.
When he called them from the Djiboutian prison to tell them where he was, they were already mobilized and quickly contacted the U .S. government to get him released.
Mokhtar and his suitcase full of coffee samples were sprung from jail again.
With his samples in hand, he flew from Djibouti to Kenya, then to Amsterdam, then home to San Francisco.
After a couple days there, he made it to Seattle and arrived at the the Specialty Coffee Association Expo, right on time.
Days earlier, he was in a war zone, being held at gunpoint.
Now he was in the land of lattes.
And once again, his coffee needed to be tested and evaluated by experts.
Remember, when his first samples of Yemeni coffee were tested the year before, two of them were world -class, but 19 of them were terrible.
If Mokhtar was going to get this business off the ground and start making some sales, he had to prove to the industry that those high scores weren't a fluke.
And I get to the trade show and the coffee gets submitted and blind tastes, it does really well.
Mokhtar's samples scored higher than any Yemeni coffee had ever scored at this conference.
With those results, he caught the attention of specialty coffee insiders, including the CEO of Blue Bottle, James Freeman.
Remember, a few years ago, Mokhtar was pestering baristas at Blue Bottle to help them learn the basics about coffee.
Now he was talking to the big boss.
Mokhtar went to Blue Bottle's roasting facility in Oakland, hoping to sell some coffee.
I get there in the morning and it's my coffees.
There were two, but then there was all these other coffees on the table.
I'm like, what are these other coffees?
He goes, oh, I wanted to taste it alongside other coffees.
And he had some of the world's best coffees there.
I'm like, crap. Like now, like, yeah, our coffees are good, but along these like giants are not going to shine.
And so we're going around tasting and it's a blind tasting.
And there was one coffee, I remember it was on the left corner.
And I looked at everyone who tasted it and their face changed.
And so at the end, when they revealed the scores and they revealed which coffee was which, that was my coffee.
And to me, that was, you know, it was an amazing, it was an amazing moment because I'd never expected to be at that level, that pinnacle of quality, of flavor, of that enjoyment.
And to hear my industry hero, James Freeman, talk about this coffee, his quote was, this is what angel singing tastes like.
This is what angel singing tastes like.
James Freeman said he'd buy the entire lot, 860 pounds.
It was all the coffee Mokhtar had.
But getting the coffee out of Yemen was another ordeal.
Every morning at 4 a .m., Mokhtar checked in with his team in Yemen.
The war there was getting worse.
His processing plant had to run on generators because electricity was unreliable.
After months of delays, he got the coffee to the port of Aden and on a ship to Oakland.
Now Blue Bottle just had to sell it.
A month later, we met ahead of their launch team for this coffee, They had their marketing team there.
They had the PR team there.
They had their, all these people in this meeting.
And he mentioned it was going to be $16 for a cup.
And I just like, I stopped everyone.
I'm like, wait, excuse me?
Like, I got, I was a little mad.
I was like, I felt like, is he trying to overcharge it?
Because the story, like, why is it so expensive?
Like, who can afford that?
He goes, no, no, Moktar, like we have a formula.
Whatever the green beans cost, we just use this formula.
Like, so they normally pay, you know, I don't know, know two three dollars like a pound for coffee and then for really special coffees they might spend like you know i think eight dollars a pound this was 58 a pound for this coffee that's how much he was paying to me to you i had no idea about the price economics of coffee i just was like i went to yemen what are you being paid now these farmers okay if i told you to do this this and this and and you want to live a more dignified life like how much more should i pay you and they They said this much more.
And so I just paid them what I thought was fair for them to get paid.
I didn't think about how that would transcribe into a cup later.
I just started that way first. And so I said, who's going to buy it at $16?
Like you've never sold coffee this price before.
And James Freeman had the vision.
He said, no, this coffee is that good.
And so we went on the tour for this coffee and people had this visceral reaction.
I remember like, why would someone charge $16?
People would come to try to like talk crap about this coffee and drink it.
But like, wait, this coffee tastes like strawberries.
And it was the first time they sold a coffee with a story.
So every person who bought it, they got this coffee, but they got this like little accordion booklet and the story of it and a little cookie that was based off of my mother's recipe of cardamom cookie.
And I always joke and tell people, no, no, the coffee is $2, the cookie is $14.
Right, right. It sold out within a month, by the way.
Blue Bottle's thinking was, people will pay hundreds or thousands for a rare bottle of wine from a specific region with a special backstory.
Why shouldn't they pay top dollar for coffee?
It's on the same level.
The next year, Mokhtar shipped 50 % more coffee to Blue Bottle, and it still sold out in a month.
Soon after, the Coffee Review, the trade guy that introduced the industry's grading system, it gave one of Mokhtar's coffees a 97, the highest score ever for any coffee.
By 2018, Mokhtar was starting to think even bigger.
I did an auction in 2018, Yemen's first coffee auction.
And the way auctions work, it's a way for coffee, when there's a certain type of coffee that's really sought after, for buyers to compete for it.
And it creates these crazy, amazing prices.
And I used to make decent profit, but the auction gave me like 20x return.
You were just auctioning your own coffee.
My own private auction, yeah.
And then I started to feel uncomfortable.
Like, okay, I do this, but what about these other farmers, people who can do this also?
and I said this idea why don't we have Yemen's first national coffee auction.
Mokhtar had been doing private auctions selling his company's coffee to the highest bidder but a national auction would mean farmers across the country even ones who didn't work with Mokhtar's company could sell their coffee directly to buyers they normally wouldn't have access to on their own and keep the proceeds.
This is the auction you heard about at the start of the first episode when Mokhtar shared his feelings the evening before the event.
Our biggest fear is that we don't succeed meaning that we sell the coffees at lower price than what farmers can sell in Yemen and what's a bigger fear than that is people have given us much of their hope.
We can't fail because if we fail for this it means that people will feel that trying something new isn't going to work.
Mokhtar told me more about how the auction was set up.
We had a competition where the where farmers from around the country can submit their coffees and the very best make it to the final round.
We had 161 submissions and 28 coffee lots from across 13 regions made it to the final, and then those get auctioned out.
And buyers from around the world could compete for those auctions and buy directly from the farmer.
Why not just take all of the great coffees that are winning, that made it to the finals of the national auction and just export them through your company?
I mean, first of all, there's way more coffee than I can ever buy in Yemen.
And my goal is always to try to help Yemen rebuild its coffee infrastructure and revitalize its ancient arts.
And that needs hundreds of people, thousands of people who want to do what I do, really, to make this actually happen.
So you have the 28 farmers who made it to the finals who got to auction their coffee.
For the other farmers who submitted but didn't make it to the final 28, is there any benefit for them to the system?
Yeah, actually, a lot of side effects happen.
So when we think of like certain types of like wines, like in Bordeaux or like in Napa Valley, it's not one state that makes it famous.
It's a lot of people doing it together and creating a brand.
So I'm trying to create this coffee brand for Yemen internationally.
I want Yemen coffee's profile to be elevated.
Secondly, in this auction, farmers, smallholder farmers thought, what's the point of me trying to pick better cherries or do these things?
Now they feel like there's actually a way for doing that.
And so now what's happened is that the price of coffee in Yemen, the average price is rising now.
So the collectors, it's really helping push the industry forward. Because right now, less than 2 % of Yemen's coffee is specialty coffee.
And we're trying to push it to go to like, you know, much higher than that.
Yeah. Mokhtar spent years working on this national auction.
He created a nonprofit, the Mocha Institute, to manage it.
He took time away from his coffee business, traveling back and forth to Yemen, getting government officials and academics and farmers and exporters all involved.
The big day was set for August 31st, 2022, just this past summer.
And right before, Mokhtar decided to do something unexpected and out of character.
I almost couldn't believe it myself.
And I was like, okay, I'm going to take a couple of days to go, you know, I'm going to I forced myself to go on a little, like, small mini vacation.
So I promised myself I would not look at my phone or laptop.
I'm just going to go have this vacation.
The vacation was during the auction?
It was the day of the auction.
Yeah, I was like, I'm not going to, I'm going to just disconnect because it's been, you know, at this point, two years of my life and I haven't taken any breaks.
And I was in London.
I'm like, let me just go to the south of France, to Nice.
I've always wanted to go there.
Let me just go and just chill there for a couple of days.
And I couldn't even enjoy anything.
I was just, like, terrified that it would happen.
The promise Mokhtar made to himself about how he was going to disconnect, he broke it almost immediately.
He was in his hotel room in the south of France, glued to his laptop, waiting for the auction to start.
The buyers would be all over the world.
They had bought samples of the coffees being auctioned, so they knew which ones they wanted ahead of time.
The auction goes live at 10 a .m. London time.
And so most of the buyers are a lot of them from Asia, so like in that part of the world.
But also, there are people up at 1, 2 a .m. in the U .S., like Goodman Roasters in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
and so it started out very slow you know and a lot of the like half of the lots no one bid on them in the first like hour I think it was like it was like 15 that were still not it was a very bad sign and so I remember like I'm like where are the where are the Asian buyers like why aren't they waking up and then the first Korean buyer woke up Marcella from South Korea he gets up and he starts to bid in okay great Koreans are in there I did this thing where as a different country would I would put a song and send to different WhatsApp groups.
So when that happened, ganging style.
When Goodman Roasters from Tennessee came on, I put on the Chattanooga Choo -Choo.
Is that the Chattanooga Choo -Choo?
Yes, yes, track 29!
When Kuwait, I think it was Jarrah from Richard's Coffee, and Kuwait came on, I put on an Arabic Kuwaiti song.
That was my way of kind of trying to ease the tension for our team members because they were very stressed out like hey guys it's all great you know and then there was still not a lot of buyers from Asia like why aren't they coming on and so guys these guys are like professionals they're gonna come in the last second you know that scene in the big short when Brad Pitt goes on in that pub and puts on his headset 90 million 70 85 88 84 and I sent that scene to them and Jay was like oh I love that scene and they did How much time was left in the auction at that point?
We didn't know how long it would last because it can go from an hour to like five hours How do you determine when it ends?
The way it works is that after the first hour a timer goes off three minute timer and if it gets to zero and no one bids the auction ends and every time someone bids it starts again Right It was a three minute timer It would get to like 20 seconds and then come back again you know and that kept happening and so at that time we didn't know it would be the last like 45 minutes or that's half hour almost the last lot got bid on like okay thank god everybody has their coffee now I can like now I can breathe now let's just see how far I can go these farmers they've never sold coffee most of them more
than $8 a pound so the prices went on for like $25 a pound $26 there was one that was like $40 then there was one that went to like $50 and then there's another one that went to $78 a pound and so for $78 a pound.
That's life -changing for some of these farmers.
These final results topped all of Mokhtar's expectations.
Two years of work paid off.
I remember after that, I fell asleep, like I have, I sleep like five, six hours, sometimes four.
And I, in my adult life, have never slept that much. I went to sleep at 1 a .m. and I woke up at 11 a .m., like straight sleeping.
You talked about out the idea of sort of like the blind spots that we all have. I feel like you thinking that you would be able to relax in Nice on the day of this auction.
That's a blind spot.
Like that does not seem realistic.
Like I was like, if there's anywhere in the world I'm going to be able to relax and force myself to do this, it's going to be the French Riviera.
It's good to enjoy what you do.
And that's really amazing.
But you do, you do have to make sure that you take these, these breaks, you know, just like...
Yeah, for sure. But not on the day of the biggest event that you've been working towards for two years.
You take the vacation after that, Moktar.
I mean, hearing you say it right now, it sounds ridiculous.
Is your grandfather still with us?
My grandfather passed away like two years ago from cancer.
And he was able to see a lot of, like, you know, my coffee, the first launch and the things that happened.
and I wish it was around to see the auction and see our coffee estates.
But everything I do, I try to showcase the best he taught me and what I learned from him in my life.
I think that our grandparents teach us how to live by their passing.
When he passed away, I really felt this mortality in a different way.
And like, wow, we have a few breaths in this.
what are we going to do here, what are we going to leave behind and so he would always ask me what is your fingerprint on this earth asma in Arabic, what are you going to leave behind here and so he left behind an amazing legacy and I hope to continue that through my work music That is Mokhtar al -Khanshali.
If you want to learn more about him, Dave Eggers wrote a book that goes into his journey in even greater detail.
It's called The Monk of Mocha.
You can get it wherever books are sold.
And if you want to buy some of Mokhtar's coffee, you can do that at PortOfMocha .com.
that's M -O -K -H -A dot com and please connect with our show wherever you listen whatever your podcasting app is just go there right now go to our show page and click plus or heart or favorite or subscribe or follow whatever it is in your app there's a thing to do please do it you can do it right now while you're listening thank you this show is produced by me along with senior producer Emma Morgenstern and producer Andres O 'Hara our editor is Tracy Samuelson additional editing by Devin Decomo Our engineer is...
Jared O 'Connell. Music help from Black Label Music.
The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher.
Our executive producers are Eric Eddings and Colin Anderson.
Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
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