Yemen Coffee

Courtesy of Kenneth Davids, 21st Century Coffee: A Guide

Coffee from the central mountains of Yemen at the southwestern tip of the Arabian Peninsula is the world’s oldest continuously produced commercial  coffee. Most of it is still grown today, as it was over 500 years ago, on terraces clinging to the sides of semi-arid mountains below ancient stone villages that rise like geometric extensions of the mountains themselves. In the summer, when the scrubby little coffee trees are beginning to blossom, misty rains temporarily turn the Yemeni mountains a bright green. In the fall, the clouds dissipate and the air turns bone dry as the coffee fruit ripens, is picked and appears on the roofs of the stone houses, spread in the sun on tarpaulins to dry. During the dry winter, water collected in small reservoirs often is directed to the roots of the coffee trees to help them survive until the drizzles of summer return.

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Ancient Methods

Most Yemen coffees are still processed as they have been for centuries. They are natural-processed coffees, dried with the fruit still adhering to the beans. After drying the shriveled fruit husk is traditionally removed by millstone, which accounts for the rough, irregular look of many Yemen beans. The husks of the dried coffee fruit, neatly broken in half by the action of the millstones, are used to make a sweet, lightly caffeinated drink Yemenis call quishr. The husks are combined with spices and boiled. The resulting beverage is cooled to room temperature and drunk in the afternoon as a thirst-quencher and pick-me-up.

Yemen Growing Regions

Regional names for Yemen coffee are as irregular as the beans themselves. For example, when I was working in Yemen, coffee traders might say they had an Ismaili coffee available, but it was seldom entirely clear whether they were describing a coffee from the Bani Ismail growing district, beans from a variety of coffee tree they called Ismaili, or both.

Matari, Haraz, More

Given that caveat, this much can be said about traditional market names for Yemen coffee. The most famous traditional names are associated with regions close to the highway from the capital Sana’a westward down to the main Red Sea port Al Hudaydah. The two best known are Matari (also Mattari) and Haraz (also Harazi, Haraaz and other variations). Matari properly describes coffee from Bani Matar, a very high-altitude growing district just southwest of Sana’a. Hirazi (or Harazi, Haraaz and other variations) is produced in the next set of mountains west of Sana’a. Occasionally a coffee may appear on specialty markets marked Hayma or Haymah, from a region west of Sana’a and just north of Bani Matar. The market name Sanani usually describes a blend of coffees from various regions west of Sana’a.

Coffee is grown many places elsewhere in western Yemen, including the southwest, near the city of Taiz, and northwest, toward the border with Saudi Arabia, in Sa’dah Governate. Or at least it was, before the latest round of savage and pointless proxy wars. The tall, elegant, multi-floored mud-brick buildings of Sa’dah in the north struck me as one of the most poetic spectacles I have ever seen. May buildings, coffees and people survive.

Yemen Coffee Ratings and Reviews

The Yemen coffee reviews below are listed in reverse chronological order by review date. Only reviews published in the past five years are displayed. Click here to view older reviews of coffees from Yemen. Older reviews may no longer accurately reflect current versions of the same coffee.