Ali Kabeer farms a plot called Wadi Al Sail, on terraces above the village of Akamat al-Me'qaab, at around 2,100 metres in East Haraz. His wife and three daughters work it alongside him. They pick by hand, cherry by cherry, sort the red fruit from the yellow afterwards, and dry it on raised beds they turn every morning and cover every night.
We can tell you all of that. For a Yemeni coffee, that's the unusual part.
Yemen Ali Kabeer Natural is a nanolot. One farmer, one farm, one village, one harvest, and it's just gone into our Special Reserve collection.
Why hardly any Yemeni coffee carries a name
Coffee in Yemen doesn't move the way it does almost anywhere else. Exporters rarely buy from farms. Cherry is bought in the pod, whole and dried, through a long chain of middlemen who store it and blend it as it travels, mixing farms, villages, varieties and sometimes crop years before it reaches an exporter at all.
The names on Yemeni bags reflect that. Matari, Sanani, Harazi: broad areas rather than places, and used loosely even then. Mislabelling is common enough to be a research problem. A 2024 study in Scientific Reports set out to build a near-infrared tool for verifying where Yemeni beans actually come from, on the grounds that the coffee's scarcity and price make it a target for fraud and adulteration.
Scale is the other half of it. Yemen produced around 26,500 tonnes of coffee in 2024, roughly 0.2% of world output. It exported just 1,786 tonnes. Around 40% of what the country produces remains in the domestic market, while the conflict that began in 2015 has made moving coffee out of the country harder still.
So a Yemeni coffee traceable to one farm usually means somebody has built a route around the trader network rather than through it.
The man who built the route
A few years ago two Yemeni coffee producers got visas to visit the UK and spent time at the London School of Coffee, learning about roasting, cupping and what buyers here look for. On that trip they met Taher Jiwanji. A civil engineer, Taher had volunteered in Yemen years earlier on road and infrastructure projects, and had kept a strong connection with the country and its people.
So he offered to help. He set up a company to bring their coffee into the UK, and when the producers went home he took on the importing himself, with no background in the coffee trade at all. A steep learning curve.
That company is Aqeeq Haraz Bunn. It buys fresh ripe cherry directly from farmers in Sharqi Haraaz and runs its own collection centres in the region. Cash at the farm gate for fresh cherry, rather than dried pods bought off a trader six steps down the line, is what makes a name like Ali Kabeer's possible.
Ali Kabeer and family
Ali grew up on the farm and learned the work from his family, who have been growing coffee in this part of Yemen for generations. Among local farmers he's a respected figure, for his own experience and for the family name behind it.
He manages several small farms and Wadi Al Sail is one of the best of them. He works to a strict rotation, so every plot gets attention through the year rather than a visit at harvest.
What stands out most is who does the work. Ali's wife and three daughters are central to the farming and to the running of the farms. Through harvest the family works as a single unit, and the women are at the centre of the picking and the hand sorting, which is where the quality of a natural is won. His daughters are involved at every stage, from the terraces through to the drying beds, which is how the next generation of female coffee expertise in Yemen gets built.
Wadi Al Sail, and the mountains around it
A wadi is a valley or watercourse that stays dry most of the year and carries water only after rain. That tells you most of what you need to know about farming here.
Yemen's coffee regions get under 400mm of rainfall a year. Across more than 62,000 arabica-growing points mapped worldwide, the lowest annual figure recorded is around 754mm. That makes Yemen's coffee-growing areas some of the driest places in the world where Arabica is cultivated.
Haraz manages it on infrastructure built by hand generations ago: stone terraces holding soil onto slopes that shouldn't be farmable at all, stone dams, covered cisterns and spate channels that catch flood water when it comes. It's one of Yemen's five main growing regions, alongside Bani Matar, Bani Hammad, Bura'a and Haimateen, and it's widely reckoned to be the best of them. Elevation runs from about 1,700 to 2,600 metres. The soil is volcanic, mineral rich, and drains sharply. Days are hot, nights are properly cold, and that swing slows the cherries right down. Density and concentrated sugars come out of it. Harvest generally runs October to December.
One more thing about Haraz. Across most of Yemen, farmers have pulled out food and coffee crops for qat, a mildly narcotic shrub that pays better and drinks enormous quantities of scarce water. In parts of Haraz that has gone into reverse, with villages uprooting qat and putting coffee terraces back. It's one of the few hopeful stories in Yemeni agriculture.
Ja'adi, and what the DNA said
Ja'adi is a traditional Yemeni landrace name. The name comes from ja'd, Arabic for curly or rough. Ask a farmer in Haraz what it refers to and you'll get one of two answers. Some point at the leaves, which have a wavy, crimped edge. Others point at the cherries, which grow in tight clusters pressed hard against the branch. Lovely to look at, an absolute pain to pick.
Both answers describe how a tree looks. Neither says anything about its ancestry. That's how nearly all Yemeni coffee names work, and for decades the specialty trade printed them on bags in the slot where you'd otherwise find Bourbon or Caturra.
In 2022 a team from Qima Coffee and RD2 Vision published the genetics. They visited 148 farms, genotyped 88 trees, and found no statistically significant association between the name a farmer gave a tree and the genetic group that tree belonged to. Ja'adi came out better than most: 15 of the 18 sampled Ja'adi trees sat in a single group, the one Qima named Yemenia in 2020.
Yemenia is the third identified genetic population of cultivated Arabica, alongside the groups traditionally associated with Typica/Bourbon and the SL populations. It's the first newly identified cultivated Arabica mother population in about a century, and it grows nowhere on earth except Yemen.
That makes Yemenia the strongest genetic match for Ja'adi in the study, but not a one-to-one definition of the name. The remaining three sampled Ja'adi trees fell into other genetic groups, which is exactly why Yemeni coffee names are so interesting — and so difficult to map neatly onto coffee's conventional idea of variety.
Ja'adi is also the most geographically pinned of the major Yemeni names. Farmers cited it in one governorate only, Sana'a, and within that it clustered in Haraz, where it made up around a third of every name offered. Growers there draw finer distinctions of their own, including an eastern Ja'adi found in Sharqi Haraaz. Which is exactly where this farm sits.
If you want the full argument, the survey data and a family tree you can poke at, we've written a deep dive on Ja'adi here.
Raised beds, and why this one is so clean
Yemeni naturals carry a reputation for being rustic, muddled, sometimes unpleasantly fermented. That reputation was earned honestly, on rooftops, with loose sorting and long storage along the way. This lot sits at the other end of the scale, and the reason is in the handling.
Everything is picked by hand, cherry by cherry. No machinery goes near it, and only ripe fruit comes off the tree. The harvest is separated by hand afterwards, red cherries sorted from yellow so the flavour stays consistent, then floated in water so anything underdeveloped or damaged is out before drying starts.
The cherries dry in the husk with the fruit whole, on raised beds rather than rooftops or bare ground. The family turns them every day so they dry evenly and covers the beds at night to keep moisture off. Air moving underneath the cherry is the whole difference. It's a small change set against centuries of practice, and it's where the clarity in this cup comes from.
Year two
Last year we bought a Yemeni lot from the villages of Zahra and Bani Murra, higher up at 2,350 metres, grown by a small group of smallholders and dried on raised beds for 19 days. Ja'adi, natural, dark chocolate and plum jam with nutmeg and cinnamon.
Same mountain range this year, same varietal, same importer, same approach to processing, and a cup with an obvious family resemblance. Plum sweetness wrapped in warm baking spice, both years. What's changed is the resolution. Last year we could name two villages. This year we can name one family.
In the cup
Think of plum crumble, with luscious stewed fruit sweetness and body sprinkled with the darker sweetness of brown sugar. Cutting through the plum is zingy raspberry cordial and a touch of blackcurrant. The gentle kick of Allspice is balanced by the syrupy body, but the finish is super clean and sweet, leaving a delicate honey note lingering in the aftertaste.
We scored it 92 points using Cup of Excellence methodology once it landed, confirming on the cupping table what we already suspected at origin. If you want to know what a score like that actually means, we've written a piece on cupping scores here.
We take this one gently. Spice is the first thing to go if you push a Yemeni coffee too far, and all that time drying in the husk has already built the body and the sweetness. So we stay out of its way and let the fruit and the spice arrive with their edges still on.
Filter is where it shows best. The clarity keeps the plum, the raspberry and the Allspice separate instead of folding them into general sweetness. It'll take an espresso ratio too if you like a heavy, fruit-forward shot.
There are 20 kilos of it
Twenty kilos, roasted. That's the whole lot.
It came off one farm's terraces above Akamat al-Me'qaab, picked and sorted by one family, cherry by cherry, and carried out of a country that grows two tenths of one per cent of the world's coffee but once sat at the centre of its global trade. This is a fraction of a fraction, and we know the farm, the village and the name.
When it's gone, it's gone!
Get your bag of Yemen Ali Kabeer Natural →
