Why Yemen?
Shabbir Ezzi, an exporter of Yemeni coffee, at the Mahal Aqeequl Drying Station in Yemen.
You may be asking yourself, why would a coffee roaster launch a coffee roasting website with just one coffee? And….why Yemen?
A coffee from Yemen is our debut coffee here at Chuck’s Roast for one simple reason: Long ago, a Yemeni coffee changed my perception of what coffee could be.
Prior to tasting it, I had a pretty good idea about what coffee was. A typical washed specialty coffee from, say, Colombia is predictable in some ways. It is going to be a lovely drinking experience; one can expect balance, roundness, some fruit like orange in the cup and maybe a bit of chocolate. It will have a nice clean finish. Similar can be said for most “typical” well-grown, harvested, processed coffees from MOST coffee growing countries. Our expectations of what it will taste like are usually spot on if we have been tasting them for years.
Nothing, however, could prepare for that Yemen coffee. I assumed it would be like a “typical” dry-processed coffee from Ethiopia, sweet, dried blueberries and maybe raspberries, clean with good body. While the Yemen offered some of these flavors it seemed to open up an entirely new flavor wheel for me: Leather, cardamon, anise, figs, tobacco, preserved lemons, black pepper…huh?
It blew my mind and reset my tasting calibration for every coffee I have tasted since. In some ways throughout the years of sourcing coffee, cupping 1000s and 1000s of samples, I have subconsciously compared everything I ever cupped to that one coffee, a fools errand, for sure.
The coffee was that much of a life-changer for me.
In Yemen, many face profound poverty, food insecurity, drought, and on-going wars. It is no wonder that securing coffee from Yemen is such a challenge and that arrival lots to the USA so often fall short of expectations. But Yemen was the first county to commercialize coffee and as a crop it is still a source of pride for the people in Yemen — and rightly so.
The coffee is expensive but unfortunately that does not mean that the coffee farmers are making a lot of money. There simply is not much of it grown — especially when compared to major coffee producers like Kenya or Ethiopia — so it is rare and rarity usually means expensive. The lack of infrastructure makes processing coffee more expensive than other countries, and cost to transport coffee to port and from port can be very expensive as well, all adding to the cost per pound green. Sadly, when the quality control is missing — which is often the case in Yemen — a coffee roaster could very easily end up with very expensive, very bad coffee that is un-sellable, or maybe sellable once to customers who will never buy it again. Not good.
But luckily there are some organizations, Yemeni exporters/millers, and importers working to both improve the quality and consistency of the coffee and to insure that a bit more money ends up in the hands of the people who are growing it. In this case, Cafe Imports is working with Mahal Aqeequl drying station in Yemen to pay farmers a premium for delivering perfectly ripe coffee cherries and then processing the coffee carefully under elevated quality control.
The result is “Haraaz Red” a brand BRCR started buying many years ago. Quality slipped a bit for a couple years but when it came to starting this venture, Cafe Imports was the first importer I reached out to and they kindly sent me a sample. It was fantastic. Really lovely. For me it makes perfect sense to kick off Chuck’s Roast with this wonderful coffee so we bought a small amount, about 60 pounds green, but when it is gone it is gone. No more of this crop is available.
So for now, let’s just enjoy this one and lets enjoy the start of this coffee journey.
Cheers
-Chuck