SUPER LIMITED RELEASE

MEDIUM ROAST
8oz. whole bean coffee
Natural process

Thick, syrupy body with cocoa, honey and caramel as the main sweetness. A dried fruit base comes up underneath the florals and warm spices. Strawberry milk notes with creamy red fruit and chocolate notes linger in the aftertaste.

Info
This is from a very small lot of coffee from Ansi coffee in Yemen, gathered, milled and exported by Pearl of Tehama, the export house run by Fatoum Muslot, one of the first Yemeni women to build a coffee export business under her own name. She runs it as a continuation of her father Ali Hiba Muslot’s coffee trade, and a large part of the company’s work is getting farms access to a market at all, not just filling containers.

Yemeni coffee has been sold under regional names for centuries, and Ansi is one of the old ones. It points at the Anis growing country in Dhamar Governorate, in the central highlands, where the Anis and Ans districts sit on mountain slopes running down toward the western escarpment. Holdings here are small and family held, worked on stone terraces cut into ground far too steep to farm any other way, a practice that goes back hundreds of years in this part of the country.

There is no clean varietal name to hand you on a lot like this, and that is the honest answer rather than a dodge. It is Arabica of Yemeni heirloom stock. The local names growers use, Udaini, Tufahi, Dawairi and Jaadi, describe tradition, leaf and cherry shape more than they describe genetics: trees carrying the same name in two different valleys often turn out not to be the same plant, and where a tree grows is a better guide to what it actually is than what it gets called. Heirloom is the accurate label, not a marketing shrug.

Processing is natural, the way essentially all Yemeni coffee is done. The coffee cherry is picked ripe, then dried whole in the sun on rooftops and raised beds until the fruit goes dry and brittle around the seed. This is the oldest continuous natural processing tradition anywhere, and it is not the tidy, uniform raised bed natural you get from a modern Latin American mill. Drying happens in thin, dry mountain air, in batches sized to a single household, and the lot in front of you is the sum of a great many of those small dryings. That is exactly where the character comes from, and also why the beans look the way they do.

Getting the coffee out of the country is the hard part. Roughly 90,000 farmers still grow coffee in Yemen, and export has been squeezed for years by conflict and by the cost and difficulty of moving anything through the country’s roads and ports, which is a big part of why Yemen sits where it does on price. Pearl of Tehama has kept buying, sorting and shipping straight through it.