Characteristics of Yemen Mocha Coffee Beans? Yemen Coffee Yemen Mocha Coffee's Cultivation History

In 1708, de la Roque and three ships of the French East India Company arrived at the port of Mocha in Yemen - the first Frenchmen to sail around the southern tip of Africa and into the Red Sea. The risk and the year-long journey had one purpose: to buy coffee directly at its source.

For a long time we have associated coffee with Latin America, but for roughly 300 years - half the time coffee has been a traded commodity - the Arabs held a monopoly on the Arabica coffee trade. What frustrated the French most was that the trade's middlemen were mostly Arabs, Egyptians, and Indians. That arrangement could not last, though: Europeans would eventually sweep through the coffee trade, reducing Yemen's era of monopoly to a faint, distorted memory - and de la Roque was one of the driving forces behind that wave.

Arabica coffee trees are native to Ethiopia, but the coffee drink itself was likely developed around 1400 in the city of Mocha in Yemen. By 1500 the beverage had spread across the entire Arabian Peninsula.

Ottoman sultans' envoys who arrived in France and Austria in 1665-1666 prepared these exotic drinks at lavish parties, burnishing coffee's role in Europe as a social lubricant and a status symbol. The Turks also, quite unintentionally, advanced coffee's popularity on the continent: in 1683, after their long, failed siege of Vienna, they withdrew and left behind several bags of coffee. The owner of Vienna's first coffeehouse then had the idea of filtering the sediment out of Turkish coffee and adding honey and milk, making the drink far more acceptable to European palates. Even so, Arabica coffee remained a rare luxury.

Because coffee was expensive. Yemen's manual production, the layers of middlemen, and the high transport costs made it practically a luxury good. Before 1690, the world's entire coffee supply grew in just three small producing districts of Yemen - steep, irrigated mountains divided into tiny gardens, tended by only a few hundred farmers.

Farmers carried beans from nearby gardens to market year-round. De la Roque recorded that the harvest was "irregular in quantity and timing, so Arabs knew nothing of so-called harvest seasons." Farmers brought coffee to market six days a week, each day offering slightly more than the last, holding back whenever prices dipped. In the market, Indian and Arab merchants controlled the business. Although Dutch and British East India companies had kept representatives in Mocha since the early 17th century, they - like de la Roque - had to buy through Indian intermediaries, said to be the most ruthless bargainers of all. Europeans held a weak commercial position because they lacked political leverage, and the only European commodity the Yemenis wanted was piastres minted from Mexican silver, payable immediately.

Encouraged by the first voyage's success, de la Roque returned to Mocha two years later. This time he met the King of Yemen and found the king had planted coffee across a large area. The Frenchman criticized him for it, remarking that European kings grew only ornamental plants in their royal botanical gardens.

He would come to regret that remark deeply. Back in Paris, he discovered his description of Louis XIV's royal garden was wrong, and the merchant closed his adventure report by writing: "The most appropriate and fitting conclusion to this report is to mention... the coffee tree finally sent from Holland."

The coffee tree planted in the Sun King's garden became a living witness to Europe's colonization of the Americas. Its seeds crossed the Atlantic, and it became the ancestor of countless coffee trees in the New World. The French had found their way around the Arab monopoly. Within 50 years, coffee from Martinique - a French colony - gradually displaced Mocha coffee in the Cairo market. Yemen could not compete with colonial-scale production. By 1900, Yemeni beans accounted for less than 1% of world production. Mocha's 300-year reign over the global coffee market now survives only in the name of a special beverage that mixes chocolate with coffee grown in the Americas.

Yemen Mocha

Botanically, coffee began in Ethiopia; culturally, though, the event that carried the coffee drink to the wider world happened in Arab Yemen. From then on, for a long stretch of history, to speak of coffee was to speak of Yemen - and of Mocha.

Mocha was a commercial port, just as Brazilian coffee ships from the port of Santos, making "Santos" shorthand for Brazilian coffee. In the same way, the port of Mocha lent its name to all Yemeni coffee.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommends Yemen Mocha Brewing Parameters:

V60 / 1:15 / 89°C / Time: 1 minute 50 seconds

Flavor Profile:

Spice, Chocolate, Grape

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

If Yemen Mocha's spicy, chocolatey depth has caught your imagination, FrontStreet Coffee's natural Huakui from Ethiopia offers a modern echo of that ancient winy character. The Huakui comes from a 200-hectare farm in the Guji Hambella district of Sidamo, where mature cherries dry on raised beds for 21 days, turned constantly for even drying, with defective or moldy beans removed by hand every three to five days, and the dried husk milled away once hard. Roasted medium-light, it opens with a light fermented wine aroma over floral and citrus notes, with mango, honeyed sweetness, and a cocoa undertone - thick in body, long in finish.

For a cleaner, more floral take on the birthplace of coffee, FrontStreet Coffee's washed Yirgacheffe remains the classic: a small town in southern Sidamo at 1700-2100m with coffee planted at 1800m and above, producing white jasmine florals, bright citrus and lemon acidity, and a tea-like elegance. One cup sits at the wild, ancient end of Ethiopia's story; the other at its most refined.