Green Coffee

Try your hand at home roasting our Yemeni coffee.

• 15 oz / 425 grams of green coffee per package.

Recommended coffees: The Collection Center Reserve is the best and most expensive. The Matari Mountain is intense and is Yemen's most famous region. The Pearls of Al Qafr make the best dark roast.

Your green coffee options:

1. Collection Center Reserve: This is coffee dried under optimal conditions at a central facility. Brighter, more fruity and nuanced flavors. (Haraaz Cooperative, Eastern Haraaz Mountains)
2. Farm Blend Reserve: Exact same coffee as #1 but dried at the farm level (not at Collection Center). Traditional and rustic flavor profile with notes of cherry, cocoa, and citrus peels. A winey and tannic mouthfeel. (Haraaz Cooperative, Eastern Haraaz Mountains)
3. Farm Blend Regular: Same rustic flavors as #2 but sourced from all the Haraaz Mountains not just the east. (Haraaz Cooperative)
4. Haraaz Cooperative: A lucky, tasty coffee, notes of red fruit. Sourced from collectors near Sana, so not as much traceability as #1–#3, but a very bright coffee. More traceability does not necessarily mean better tasting, and here is proof of random, lucky chance. (Haraaz Cooperative)
5. Matari Mountain: the highest altitude region in all of Yemen. The beans are dense and bursting with flavor. A genetic defect of "elephant ears" means this coffee is particularly hard to procure. Read more here (Rayyan Mill)
6. Pearls of Al Qafr: A coffee that makes an excellent dark roast. Sourced from the Al Qafr highlands between Yarim and Ibb.
7. Yemeni Peaberry Pearls: A basic, rustic, Yemeni coffee. (Peaberry beans)
8. Yemeni: Strip away all pretension, and this is traditional coffee. It's not the most pretty green coffee—think mottled and some broken beans—but roast it up and see why Yemen is world famous. The proof is in the cup.

If you want to learn more about these regions or these coffee mills (e.g. Haraaz Cooperative, Rayyan Mill, or Pearl of Tehama) visit our learn page. 

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Here is some random bonus reading:

#1 Collection Center Reserve, in the cooperative's own words:

"this coffee is purchased from farmers registered in our traceable coffee sourcing program that is collected in the form of freshly harvested coffee cherries and dried in our collection centers under supervised conditions."

#2 Farm Blend Reserve: The farmers are registered members of the Haraaz Cooperative, and at least 75% of the coffee is from the most recent crop year. In Yemen this is hard to come by, as farmers frequently store dried coffee cherries as a form of banking.

The Cooperative in their own words:

"the coffee is purchased as dried coffee cherries from farmers in Haraaz. This coffee is purchased from farmers registered in our traceable coffee sourcing program, assuring us the collection of current year crop. However, the coffee is dried by farmers and we have no control over the drying process."

 

More information on the Haraaz Cooperative:

The Haraaz Cooperative™ is the name we use at Al Mokha to describe the fantastic work of Shabbir Ezzi. He has been operating in Yemen since 2006, and we have worked with him since 2014.

He sources his coffee from a combination of about 800 registered farmers (reserve quality) and also from trusted collectors more generally (regular quality).

For the registered farmers, Shabbir provides them with an ID, so he can directly ensure that they are paid fair wages and their hard work is rewarded. He even has an incentive program in place, where the more coffee you produce, the more you earn per pound. These growing wages (better than linear!) prove a strong incentive to work together and build relationships for the long term.

These are good principals but there is far more than that. In the eastern Haraaz Mountains where the cooperative is based, the economics of coffee have improved so much that farmers have chosen to uproot qat—a cash crop and mild narcotic plant—and replace it with coffee. This change reflects how farmers can make more money and live a more dignified life producing coffee. In fact, Shabbir has been so successful, that all the qat has been uprooted.

General Info: As a green coffee, understand that Yemen's is not the typical lot of consistent beans that are identical from shipping container to shipping container. Rather, Yemen's coffee lacks such aesthetic uniformity and instead has a beauty of its own: the beans are smaller and varied in size. This showcases their authenticity, old-world cultivation, and natural processing of 10 - 20 days drying in the sun after harvest.

The magic of Yemen is not the volume of consistent coffee over time but rather the story that each batch and each harvest tells. In Yemen there are 100,000 farmers producing on average 115 kg of coffee annually per farmer. These are backyard, terraced gardens on Yemen's steep mountain slopes. When you roast and enjoy this coffee you will inevitably appreciate and understand the incredible process that brought this coffee from farmer to your cup.

Wholesale: For 10 - 50 lbs green call or email. Volume discount: 10% (10-20 lbs) to 15% (21 - 50 lbs).

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