Yemen: Ali Kabeer 125g

This coffee is a preorder as we only have a tiny amount. it will be roasted on Thursday the 10th of September.

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.

Last year we purchased a Yemeni lot from producers in the small village of Bani Murra. This year we've honed in on a nanolot from one producer in particular, Ali Kabeer. This lot stood out to us on the cupping table for its incredible complexity of flavour and refinement of the natural processing, and it was the cherry on the cake to realise it was a lot from a single producer, which is extremely rare to find in Yemen. Now that it's landed, we've scored it 92 points using Cup of Excellence methodology, confirming what we tasted back then.

A few years ago, two Yemeni coffee producers were lucky enough to get visas to visit the UK and attended the London School of Coffee, to learn more about roasting, cupping and what customers are looking for. On their trip, they met Taher Jiwanji. They belong to the same branch of Islam, which encourages members of the community to help others. A civil engineer, many years ago Taher had been to Yemen to volunteer helping with construction of roads and infrastructure, so his familiarity and fondness for the people and country meant he offered to help them out on their visit and set up a company to bring the coffee they produced into the UK. When they returned to Yemen, Taher took on the job of importing their coffee, a steep learning curve for someone who was new to the coffee business. We're glad to have carried this relationship into a second year with this lot.

Ali Kabeer's family is part of the long coffee growing tradition in this region of Yemen. With several small farms, his wife and three daughters play a central part in making sure all the farms are properly looked after and that coffee is carefully, selectively picked, diligently sorted and painstakingly processed to the highest standards. The coffee production is done in line with traditional coffee growing, but attention to detail, such as raised beds for drying, is what sets this coffee apart.

The varietal is Ja'adi, and it's a curious one. The name comes from the Arabic ja'd, meaning curly or rough, and farmers in Haraz will tell you it describes either the wavy edge of the leaves or the tight clusters the cherries grow in, which are lovely to look at and a real pain to pick. What it doesn't describe is ancestry. When Qima Coffee genotyped Yemeni trees in 2022, the names farmers use turned out not to track genetics reliably, though Ja'adi held up better than most: 15 of the 18 trees sampled belonged to Yemenia, the third mother population of arabica and one that grows nowhere outside Yemen. There's a full deep dive on Ja'adi over in our Varietal Guide if you want the whole story.

• Country: Yemen
• Region: Wadi Al-Sail
  
• Producer: Ali Kabeer & Family
• Elevation: 2,100 m.a.s.l.
• Varietal: Ja'adi
• Process: Natural

Tasting Notes: Plum crumble, raspberry cordial, allspice.

Cup of Excellence Cupping Scores

• Clean cup: 8
• Sweetness: 7
• Acidity: 6.5
• Mouthfeel: 6.5
• Flavour: 7
• Aftertaste: 6.5
• Balance: 6.5
• Overall: 8
• Correction: +36
• Total: 92

If you'd like to find out more about how we score coffees, make sure to read our blog post “What Do Coffee Cupping Scores Actually Mean?” and if you'd like to try cupping yourself, we've got a guide to that too! What is Coffee Cupping.

Roasting Information
Medium to medium dark - You need a good medium - through first crack and into the gap - to get the best from this coffee, but as with many Yemeni coffees the appearance can be tricky (appearing darker than it actually is) and the temperature may be higher than expected to get this roast level. This is a very tricky coffee to roast!