Coffee's wild ancestor grows in Ethiopia, but the crop crossed the Red Sea and became an agricultural and commercial system in Yemen. By the fifteenth century, Sufi communities in the south of the Arabian peninsula were drinking it to sustain night-long devotions, and within decades it had moved from the mosque to the coffee house.
The port
Al-Makhā — Mokha — sat on the Yemeni coast of the Red Sea, close to the strait that leads out to the Indian Ocean. Coffee grown on the highland terraces was carried down by camel and shipped from there to Jeddah, Suez and Alexandria, and onward to Cairo, Istanbul, Venice and Marseille. From roughly the early sixteenth century to the early eighteenth, Mokha handled essentially all the coffee entering world trade.
The monopoly and its end
Yemen guarded the trade carefully; exported beans were treated so they could not germinate. It did not hold. Seedlings reached India, and by the early eighteenth century the Dutch were growing coffee in Java, the French in the Caribbean and the Portuguese in Brazil. Colonial plantations at scale undercut mountain terraces worked by hand, and Mokha's share collapsed within a generation.
Why the name survived
By the time the trade moved, 'mocha' had been the word for good coffee in European commerce for two hundred years, and it stuck. It survives in three separate senses today: the historical Yemeni origin, the classic Mokha–Java blend, and — because Yemeni coffee tastes of chocolate — the café drink that combines coffee and cocoa. Only the first has anything to do with the port.
The present
Yemeni coffee returned to specialty attention in the 2000s and 2010s, as cooperatives improved processing and buyers rediscovered the origin. Production remains tiny and the working conditions are difficult: conflict, water scarcity, and competition from qat for the same terraces. What survives is a farming system that never industrialised — which is both the reason the coffee is remarkable and the reason there is so little of it.