Yemen Auction #15

GROWER
Abdo Yahya

REGION
Hayma Kharijiya, Sana’a

CULTIVAR
Yemenia

ELEVATION
2300 m

HARVEST
November 2020-January 2021

LOOK FOR
Plum | Cola | Cherry

Buy Yemen Auction #15 here.

Yemen presents a coffee paradox. This small country in the Middle East is the true birthplace of global coffee commerce and center of origin for the more than 70 countries currently occupied by the coffee diaspora. It is home to heirloom coffee types you cannot find anywhere else on the planet, cultivated using techniques completely unique in the industry. The landscapes in many of its growing areas are so startlingly rugged, steep, and rocky that at first glance they seem downright inhospitable to plant life, much less capable of producing some of the most astonishingly flavorful coffees you’ve ever tried. Despite the daunting environmental obstacles, coffee has been cultivated successfully in Yemen for centuries and many family farms there date back over a dozen generations. Given the profound cumulative knowledge acquired over that length of time, it is safe to say that coffee farmers in Yemen have likely forgotten more about coffee than most agronomists will ever learn.

Yet despite all of this, Yemen has spent most of the last twenty years almost entirely disconnected from the dynamic specialty coffee movement that has taken root in so many other countries, its uniquely tasty coffees largely unknown to Western coffee drinkers. The good news is that some of the very best coffees Yemen has to offer are more accessible today than they’ve ever been.

There is a new generation of Yemeni entrepreneurs who’ve stimulated a wave of reinvestment in Yemeni coffee and are working on multiple fronts to introduce a global audience to its merits by making well-crafted coffees from remote parts of Yemen more obtainable. This particular lot was produced at micro scale by a farmer named Abdo Yahya in Hayma Kharijiya. It comes to you via an auction hosted by the Alliance for Coffee Excellence (ACE) in partnership with Qima Coffee, which has been laying the groundwork for these kinds of coffees over the last decade. It was among our favorites in the auction and we feel fortunate to have the opportunity to share it with you.

— Geoff Watts
Vice President of Coffee