Your Mocha Is Named After a Yemeni Port — Epoche B1
Coffee question of the week ☕ Yesterday at my regular place on Rainbow Street the menu said espresso, latte, mocha - and I finally asked the owner the question: what is a mocha, actually? He put down the milk jug and told me a story with a port in it. The coffee tree comes from Ethiopia. But coffee the drink entered the world through Yemen. About five hundred years ago, Sufi brotherhoods there brewed it to stay awake through their night devotions - the cup had a job long before it had a fashion. From the Sufi lodges it travelled with pilgrims and traders to Mecca, to Cairo, to Istanbul, one coffee house at a time. Even the word coffee is the Arabic qahwa, worn smooth by Turkish and then Dutch mouths on its way into English. And in those first centuries, nearly every sack of beans left through one harbour: Mokha, on Yemen's Red Sea coast. For European buyers the port's name simply meant coffee - you bought "mocha" the way plates became "china". Yemeni beans were prized for a taste with something of chocolate in it, so when cafes much later began stirring actual chocolate into coffee, the mixture took the old port's name. That is what the menu is remembering: a drink of espresso, milk and chocolate, ordered on Rainbow Street, named for a Yemeni harbour that shipped beans five hundred years ago. Best part: he told me half his customers assume mocha is Italian. Your turn: which word on a menu near you is secretly a place? I am collecting them - put yours in the comments 👇 References Al-Mutanabbi (c. 915-965 CE). Diwan Al-Mutanabbi. Various editions.