Coffee SOS: A Sinking Lebanese Brew
My morning coffee is taking a dive, like Lebanon. It’s instant and will plunge to even cheaper varieties from the next jar.
Thanks to a tanking economy spiraling out of control, frenzied exchange rate of the Lebanese Lira (L.L.) against the U.S. Dollar to which it’s been pegged artificially for decades, ballooning (hyper?) inflation, political/social unrest since an uprising/revolution began in October 2019, skyrocketing unemployment and poverty levels, a sharp drop in coffee and other imports due to an acute dollar shortage, and the coronavirus nightmare, my “jolt of java” is now a blowout.
A 200-gram (7 oz) jar of instant from Switzerland that cost $7.26 five months ago at the official exchange rate is about $10, and climbing, if you can find it.
It’s been replaced by a 200-gram jar of Brazilian for $5.90, until further notice.
A special offer of two cans of 95-gram/can Italian instant coffee hovered at $7.25 the last time it was available.
A 250-gram pack of gourmet Arabic (Turkish) coffee is about $4, depending on the store. The cheaper ordinary variety of the same brand is $.60 less.
Granted, I was never a snobbish aficionada of the “insert-appropriate-cliché” coffee brand or bean variety, or “let’s swoon over such-and-such aroma,” and I’m averse to Starbucks’ latest flavor crazes.
But I do enjoy a good cup of espresso, cappuccino, mocha-flavored anything, and Arabic/Turkish coffee.
Depending on where you’re from, that last one is often called Arabic or Turkish coffee and is the dark thick brew boiled over an open (preferably gas) stove, served with or without sugar.
The ‘Turkish’ refers to when the Ottoman Empire expropriated the Arabic bean to Vienna and elsewhere in Europe during its marauding expansion back then.
If it’s late in the day, the caffeine from that coffee can be too stimulating. But it shouldn’t be confused with the type served in the Arabian Gulf countries where the concoction is more cardamom and less coffee.
Back to Lebanon where not everyone is surrendering to austere coffee measures.
“I buy a specialty blend of Colombian, Sumatran and Costa Rican,” said Ali, a film editor who usually drinks French press coffee. “It comes in a pack for a kilogram (2.2 lbs) and costs L.L. 33,750.”
That’s about $22 at the pre-revolution official exchange rate.
With the sharp devaluation of the Lira, people going on half, or no, salaries, capital controls by banks rationing how much customers can withdraw from their accounts in Liras or U.S. Dollars — both in extremely short supply — and being prevented from transferring funds outside the country except for special cases (if at all), that nice brew could become history.
Lana, an NGO staffer who also buys that specialty blend from a coffee purveyor-cum-café with branches in several Beirut locations, paid $18.15 a kilo in October 2019. But she and her apartment mates grind the beans for their filtered morning joe.
“I drink ‘3-in-1’ and normal house black coffee,” Bassam, a freelance journalist, told me about the sachets that combine coffee, creamer and sugar for instant easy use.
Sometimes he adds instant coffee from a jar to make it blacker. His little packets come in a bag of 30 and cost almost $6 at pre-upheaval prices.
Purists would probably consider that anathema.
Why all the fuss?
Because we give little thought to where our beans originate or are packaged. Swiss, Brazilian, Colombian, Sumatran seem mere points on a map.
Enter what Yemeni-American Mokhtar Alkhanshali told a captive audience — me included — about his passion for coffee at the Nuqat conference in Kuwait last November.
“I want the aroma of coffee. I want nothing more than the aroma of coffee. And I want nothing more from the passing days than the aroma of coffee,” he romanticized, quoting the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
Coffee farmer Alkhanshali, who grew up between the United States (San Francisco and Brooklyn) and Yemen, shocked his family by shunning a career in law to revive the glory of his ancestral land’s historically world famous coffee.
He admits to having discovered this obsession by accident about six years ago when he drank a sweet cup tasting like blueberries and learning the beans were Ethiopian, — Yirgacheffe Chelelektu to be precise.
The barista taught him that “done right” coffee tastes amazing, notably when it comes straight from the producer, and that one needed to have a direct relationship with him/her, to pay a premium price for them to live a better life to get delicious coffee.
That set Alkhanshali on a journey to discover his family’s background in coffee, the country’s rich history in cultivating and exporting the bean, and why it had taken a back seat to brews from other parts of the world, except for fanatics who were willing to dish out a pretty penny for the rare product.
“For those of you who don’t know, there’s a city in Yemen called Al Makha, which is now translated as mokha (mocha), and it’s the reason why we’re all here today,” Alkhanshali said.
There’s an ongoing debate about where coffee originated as a plant — Ethiopia or Yemen — but, as he explained, the first people who deliberately planted, harvested, roasted and brewed coffee were Yemenis who followed the Sufi tradition.
The idea that coffee could be a spiritual drink that brought the community together may strike one as odd today. People would imbibe it after long days of work, as a way to stay up at night to worship Allah (God) and compose religious songs, Alkhanshali explained.
And from there coffee began to spread throughout Yemen, we’re told, then onto the rest of the world.
To learn about soil, varietals, “cherries” (beans), when they should be harvested, the range of aromas, and what tickles people’s taste buds, Alkhanshali studied to become a coffee “sommelier” by passing 22 tests.
He got Yemeni farmers to grow a better coffee product, which he then introduced to an international market of grateful connoisseurs, and then some.
The enterprising work has been instrumental in helping the farmers steer away from planting the mild drug qat that depletes an already water-stressed country of its much-needed aqua resources.
Interestingly, fewer than 15% of the people in Yemen drink coffee.
“My project is more developmental, humanitarian, than commercial,” Alkhanshali said of the social entrepreneurship operation. He’s also set up the Mocha Foundation.
He hopes to create a renaissance of Yemen’s economy via coffee to also help with the country’s refugee crisis following years of conflict pitting internal and external warring factions, by creating jobs for young people drawn to radical groups, and, by exporting Yemeni culture.
It’s a fascinating story of adventures in an ancient land, laced with enterprise, war, and escape to safety with coffee samples to market internationally, which Alkhanshali recounted at the Kuwait confab.
He sells his award-winning coffee through the Port of Mocha site, but it’s way beyond my budget or reach.
I’m in Coronavirus self-quarantine mode — an ounce of prevention — and have to settle for my cheaper instant jars, or whatever is available after the panic buying, hoarding, and economic meltdown Lebanon is experiencing that trickles down to us.
It beats brewing wood shavings, although some marginal coffee brands probably taste like them.
There’s talk of a countrywide lockdown like Italy. The government has already declared a medical state of emergency. Whatever! Maybe one day I’ll savor good Yemeni coffee, if we survive the pandemic.