Mocha is not a bean or a chocolate but a Red Sea port in Yemen, spelled Mokha or Mocha, sitting just north of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a bottleneck about 18 miles wide. Before 1538 it was a small fishing village. The Ottomans turned it into a mandatory toll stop, requiring passing ships to put in and pay steep duties, while their governor collected the revenue two days inland in Sanaa. No coffee grew in Mocha’s hot desert; beans from Yemen’s mountains and from Ethiopia came down by camel caravan and took the port’s name on export. By the 1730s up to 4,000 Indian Banyan merchants worked the city beside English, Dutch, French, and Scottish trading factories.

Much of the supply arrived on Somali dhows from Berbera, whose merchants shut foreign ships out of their own ports and delivered goods to Mocha on their terms. The same sea lanes carried enslaved people from the Horn of Africa. Then the city fell apart: a plague killed half its people, the Dutch smuggled live coffee plants to Java, Ethiopian traders undercut Arabian coffee in North Africa, and in December 1820 the British East India Company bombarded the port. Travelers later described a ghost town, and the modern city has been fought over repeatedly in Yemen’s civil war.

• An East India Company surgeon noted one merchant receiving 50 to 60 loaded camels in a single afternoon.
• British administrators later recorded that Mocha once imported up to two thirds of its coffee from Berbera-based merchants.
• The HMS Topaz bombardment destroyed both the north and south ports after a dispute dating to 1817.
• Egyptian forces under Ibrahim Pasha later wrecked the sea walls and central citadel.
• A modern port was built in 1955, and a 2021 missile and drone attack destroyed warehouses used by aid groups.