The Queen and The Asl: The Story Behind First Light Roasters

My first memory of coffee is my grandmother's hands.

This is Mogadishu, in the 1980s. I was small. She was already old. Our family had been in the city long enough to call it home, but our roots were further north, in the highlands of Cal Madow, the Black Mountains of the Sanaag region.

She used to tell us about it. She called it heaven on earth.

Coffee grows in those mountains. Wild. No one plants it in rows, no one owns the trees. It grows where it grows, in the forest, and people walk in to gather the cherries and dry them in the sun. The green beans travel down from the highlands the way the people do. Slowly, in small quantities, carried by people who know where they came from. That was the coffee on my grandmother's pan.

Before the rest of us were awake, she'd be outside with a flat iron pan over an open flame, turning the beans slowly with a wooden spoon until the smell reached the whole house. That sweet, smoky, almost-burnt-but-not-quite smell is what morning means to me, even now.

She didn't call it craft. She didn't call it anything. It was just what you did before the day started.

My wife Amal grew up in the same morning.

She's from Yemen, from a family that has been part of coffee for as long as anyone can remember the names. Her grandfather left Yemen as a young man and arrived in Ethiopia with one trade, the only one he had, and he farmed coffee there for the rest of his life. Hers is a family where coffee isn't an industry. It's how you know who you are.

When Amal and I met, we didn't know any of this about each other yet. We knew we liked the same cup at the same hour. The rest came out slowly. The grandmother with the pan. The grandfather in the Ethiopian highlands. The two of us from opposite sides of the Gulf of Aden, raised on the same smell.

Our love story, really, is a coffee story. It would be strange if we did anything else with our lives.

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