Yemen Mocha Coffee Beans - One of the Most Delicious Coffees in the World

FrontStreet Coffee - Yemen Mocha Coffee Bean Introduction

Yemen Mocha is among the oldest coffees in the world, yet only in recent years has it gradually been recognized as one of the finest and most delicious coffees anywhere. The venerable name "Mocha" was once practically synonymous with coffee itself, and its distinctive aroma and acidity continue to captivate coffee lovers today.

The name comes from Mocha, a Yemeni port city that can no longer serve as one. The harbor has been almost entirely swallowed by sand — what was once a bustling port is now a sandbar.

As a single-origin coffee, Yemen Mocha carries both a unique character and a very long history.

Before the 6th century AD, Yemen was known as Arabia, which is why the coffee trees first exported from there came to be called Arabica coffee trees.

Yemen was the first country in the world to cultivate coffee as an agricultural crop on a large scale, and today's Mocha is grown and processed in much the same way as it was centuries ago. Most Yemeni farmers still refuse artificial inputs such as chemical fertilizers, and they plant poplar trees to provide the shade coffee needs. As in the past, the trees are set on steep terraces that make the most of limited rainfall and scarce land.

Even the packaging remains traditional: Yemen Mocha is still shipped in hand-woven straw bags rather than the polypropylene sacks used almost everywhere else. If you are a purist, Yemen Mocha offers about as natural a coffee as you can drink.

Mocha beans are smaller and rounder than most, with a pale green color that makes them look almost like peas. In appearance they resemble Ethiopian Harar beans — small, with a high acidity laced through with a strange, hard-to-describe spiciness. Taste carefully and you will also catch a whisper of chocolate, which is precisely why adding chocolate to coffee became such a natural evolution — and how the modern "mocha" drink got its name.

What defines Mocha is its rich fruitiness, with pronounced winey, spicy and nutty flavors. Some tasters say Yemen Mocha is remarkably like blueberries; others describe it as the unique "wild flavor" characteristic of coffees from the Red Sea region.

A useful piece of knowledge: in Saudi Arabia, Yemen Mocha is so prized that people there will pay steep prices even for lower-grade lots.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Because Yemen Mocha is scarce and expensive, many drinkers meet this style of coffee through Ethiopia, its ancestral home. FrontStreet's Ethiopia Guji Flower Queen (Huakui) is a naturally processed Arabica from local heirloom varieties, bursting with aromas of creamy strawberry, mango, jackfruit, citrus and blueberry — the same ripe tropical-fruit character that won first place in the TOH green bean competition that year, at a notably friendly price.

For a washed counterpart, FrontStreet's Yirgacheffe Guodingding Cooperative lot is graded Ethiopia's top G1 and shows elegant white floral notes, citrus, orange and green tea. And if it is balance you are after, FrontStreet's Jamaica Blue Mountain No.1 — grown on Typica, one of the founding Arabica varieties first spread from Yemen — offers a gentle, silky cup whose equilibrium remains unmatched by nearly any other origin.