Yemen

Why this origin matters

Yemen is where coffee became a crop. The plant is native to the forests of Ethiopia and South Sudan, but it was in Yemen, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, that it was first cultivated on any scale and from Yemen that it reached the rest of the world. The two lineages that dominated world arabica for two centuries, Typica and Bourbon, both descend from plants taken out of Yemen, and genomic work confirms how closely related they are. The word mocha is a Yemeni place name: the Red Sea port through which the coffee was shipped, and which never grew any.

Where coffee grows

In the mountains, on terraces. An account written in the early 1920s describes cultivation confined to scattered mountain districts between Taiz, Ibb and Sanaa and on the routes inland from the port of Hodeida, around Manakha. It describes hillsides terraced with soil and low stone walls rising like an amphitheatre, and coffee grown in small gardens, never on large plantations. That description is a century old, and CoffeeHQ has not read a current survey of where coffee is grown.

The same account puts the best elevations at about 3,500 to 6,500 feet, roughly 1,100 to 2,000 metres, with the young trees watered from wells or irrigation channels. CoffeeHQ has read no present-day account of how the crop is watered.

Species and varieties

Arabica. Yemen is described in the genetic literature as a secondary centre from which the species was dispersed, and one study notes that a native arabica population exists there. A 2020 genomic paper says cultivation in Yemen started from a narrow genetic base, and attributes the species' extremely low variation overall to its origin in a single hybridisation event. What is grown in Yemen today is usually described as local landraces under local names; CoffeeHQ has not read a catalogue of them.

Harvest

The 1920s account has the fruit ripening from August or September, with picking continuing until the last fruit ripens the following March — a long season, on trees that carry flowers, green fruit and ripe fruit at once.

How the coffee is processed

Dry processing, on the 1922 account: the cherries are left to dry in the sun on house-top terraces or floors of beaten earth, hulled when partly dry between two small stones, one of them turned by hand, and then dried further. The husks left over are the kisher of the same account.

How it is graded and sold

For a long period, the 1922 history says, all the coffee of Arabia reached the outside world through the port of Mocha. By the early twentieth century the trade had moved to Hodeida and Aden, where the coffee was cleaned and hand-sorted in exporters' warehouses before shipment. The name Mocha stayed attached to the coffee long after the port had lost its importance.

What it tends to taste like

A trade history of 1922 describes Mocha coffee as having a distinctive winy flavour and heavy acidity. That is one trade writer's description, a century old, and CoffeeHQ has no measurement or present-day source to set beside it.

How coffee is drunk in Yemen

A trade history of 1922 says that people in Yemen did not drink coffee made from the bean but kisher (qishr), a beverage brewed from the husks of the coffee cherry, and that the bean crop was exported. CoffeeHQ has read no present-day account of what Yemen drinks.

One dated secondary source; its generalisation about a whole population is its author's.

Preparation traditions

How coffee is traditionally prepared and served in this country, in CoffeeHQ's international preparation atlas.

• Gulf Arabic coffee (qahwa)
• Yemeni qishr

History

The earliest dependable evidence of coffee drinking comes from Yemen in the mid-fifteenth century, in connection with Sufi devotions; the account usually cited credits a mufti of Aden with sanctioning it and allows that it was probably known there earlier. Cultivation followed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Around 1600 according to tradition, though the sources read give 1600, 1670 and 1695, seeds were carried from Yemen to India; a century later the Dutch were growing coffee in Java from that Indian stock, and a single plant sent to Amsterdam in 1706 became the source of coffee in the Caribbean. Separately, the French took coffee to the island of Bourbon, now Réunion. When the plant reached Yemen from Ethiopia is not established: the 1922 history says there is good reason to believe it was the sixth century, and a 2020 genomic paper's historical summary says some time in the fourteenth.

Pressures on the sector

• Scale. Cultivation has always been in small gardens on terraces, and older accounts already describe production held back by poor routes, taxes on transit and political disturbance.
• Water. The 1922 account has the young trees watered from wells or irrigation channels; CoffeeHQ has read nothing on how the crop is watered today.
• The absence of current information. No present-day source on Yemen's coffee was read for this page, and the USDA publishes no figure for it.