Why Are Yemen Coffee Beans So Rare Nowadays?

The Historical Legacy of Yemen Coffee

Many people have heard of Ethiopian coffee. Although Ethiopia is the world's first country to discover coffee, in the 17th century, the first batch of Yemeni coffee was exported to Europe via the ancient small port of Mocha. Across the sea from Yemen, Ethiopia also exported coffee through the Mocha port. Yemeni Mocha is the originator of the world's coffee trade, which is the origin of the term "Mocha coffee." Historically, the term "Mocha" was once used as a nickname for coffee. For example, the Mocha coffee and Mocha pot we hear today are tributes to Yemen.

However, Yemen was the first country in the world to produce coffee as a crop on a large scale. Coffee is cultivated at an average altitude of over 2,300 meters. High-quality Yemeni coffee has unique flavors: complex Middle Eastern spices, ripe fruits, wine notes, and cocoa, with a rich texture and intense aftertaste.

Factors Behind Yemen Coffee's Decline

Yemeni coffee also had its glorious period, but its decline has continued to this day due to multiple factors:

1. There are few suitable places for coffee cultivation in Yemen, and continuous warfare has persisted since 2015.

Yemen's coffee growing areas are almost entirely concentrated in the western mountainous regions, relying on sunlight, rainfall, and unique soil for cultivation. Since the war began in 2015, transportation infrastructure, including routes for fuel and food, has been severely damaged. This has sharply increased transportation costs for local people's travel, making it difficult for goods to enter and exit. Yemen faces severe inflation domestically; countless families have lost their sources of income; government public sectors cannot pay wages; countless people have been displaced, leaving no time to focus on the development of their coffee industry.

2. Competition from the local cultivation of the narcotic plant Qat.

Due to the instability of the world coffee market, coffee prices are often low. Yemeni coffee farmers discovered they could obtain more benefits from cultivating Qat, and most of them turned to growing Qat. According to 2012 data, Yemen's coffee production was only 198 tons, while Qat production reached 190,800 tons. By 2016, Yemen's coffee production accounted for only 0.1% of the world's total - and this was commercial beans, of which specialty coffee beans were as rare as 0.0001%.

3. Lack of proper coffee processing methods, rarely reaching specialty coffee levels

Yemen is the world's only fully natural-processed coffee-producing country. Yemen has an extremely dry climate, with coffee mainly cultivated in the western highlands, where annual rainfall is only 400-750 millimeters, far below the optimal 1,500-2,000 millimeters for Arabica. Due to the water-scarce environment, farmers have been unable to introduce more advanced washed processing methods to this day.

Farmers place harvested fruits on the roofs of stone houses built along mountains to dry. During the drying period, similar to drying rice grains, wooden rakes are used to turn them to ensure each bean dries evenly. After about twenty days, when the coffee drying is complete, the outer pulp and skin are removed to extract the coffee beans. The depulping and hulling processes rely entirely on rudimentary stone grinding equipment. Yemeni coffee has rich, complex, wild, and mellow flavors, with strong fermentation notes and lower acidity characteristics. Additionally, Yemeni coffee often contains an uncertain factor (the timing of seasonal rainfall) that makes it unpredictable.

The Revival and Future of Yemen Coffee

Currently, only a few coffee shops in China have the opportunity to taste Yemeni coffee. In recent years, Yemen has been continuously developing and optimizing its coffee cultivation. It has increasingly appeared on the specialty coffee stage, and new special processing methods have emerged, one of which has a powerful and mysterious-sounding name - the Alchemy processing method: This method involves placing whole cherries or depulped fruits into jars, adding different inert gases (carbon dioxide, nitrogen, etc.) into the jars, combining 10 bar (pressure) / 145 psi (pressure), temperature control, gas regulation, and drying management techniques to process the green beans.

Yemeni coffee is currently relatively rare and niche in the market, and in the future, people will have more opportunities to encounter Yemeni coffee.

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