Yemen - Somara

Constantly beset by challenges beyond their control — from socio-economic upheavals to environmental constraints — Yemen's coffee-farming families persevere in perpetuating their forefathers' agricultural heritage.

They resiliently tend to coffee trees that grow across terraces clinging to the steep and arid yet fertile highland terrains, like in the magnificent Al Qafr district in the Ibb Governorate, where their coffee cherries capture singularly extraordinary, sweet, and nuanced notes not found elsewhere, and coffee is their primary, if not only, source of livelihood.

Somara Village is home to no more than 1,000 residents who tend to about 5,000 productive coffee trees across farmlands collectively spanning around 21,000 square meters.

While ownership of the larger plots rest within traditionally prominent families — most of whom belong to the Yemeni diaspora and have been engaged in non-agricultural professions overseas since the 1970s — reciprocal arrangements that had been put in place with the farming families who remained have allowed for the preservation of the land and cultivation of coffee.

As the farmers take full custodianship, they are afforded a share of the harvest commensurate to operational they bear costs (such as: water and fuel for transportation). For example, if the landowner provides water and fuel, an equal share of the crop is allocated to the farmer, and if the farmer fully assumes these expenses, the distribution becomes 2/3 to the farmer and 1/3 to the landowner.

To safeguard the continuance of the coffee trade and legacy jointly fostered by the landowner and the farmer, the same reciprocal arrangement extends to the next generation of the farmer’s family when he passes on.

Our partner, Mokha not Mocha, strives to bring ease to the Yemeni farmers’ lives through their community-based specialty coffee initiatives. By astutely switching the Arabic kh in place of ch in naming his company Mokha not Mocha, its founder Abdulrahman Hayek Saeed evokes an inevitable reminiscence of the Arabian heritage of coffee. ­­As a venue for evaluating and processing of coffee cherries, as well as farmer education, the company provides opportunities to continuously improve coffee quality and commercial value, to increase the farming families’ income and better their quality of life.

Typica-Odaini, unique to the Yemeni terroir, is currently the most widely known coffee variety to originate from the country, where Odaini is one of the several vernacular names the farmers use to identify their coffees.

This variety is commonly associated with coffee trees in the Ibb Governorate, whose leaves tend to be elongated and tapered toward the tip, giving them the graceful and cascading appearance by which coffee farmers visually distinguish them from others.

For this Somara Village nano-lot, the properly ripe cherries aggregated through Mokha not Mocha’s platform were put through an anaerobic fermentation process in sealed barrels over a period of 7 to 8 days at cool temperatures of 6 C to 19 C throughout the season. Following fermentation, the cherries were moved to raised beds for a sun-drying phase that lasted from 20 to 25 days.

Prior to the involvement of civic-minded and specialty coffee-proficient producers like Mokha not Mocha, the Somara Village coffee farmers would have solely relied on a combination of their practical experience and their inherited, pragmatic understanding of how to cultivate, pick, and process the coffee cherries.

Detrimental practices that had been discontinued include indiscriminate picking of coffee cherries regardless of ripeness level, and carrying out the crucial post-harvest processing phases of fermentation and drying, as well as storage, in uncontrolled and unsatisfactory environments that compromised the organoleptic attributes of the coffees.

By introducing refinements in the farming communities’ customary practices and providing ongoing support to improve processes, equipment, and infrastructure, Mokha not Mocha creates opportunities to reveal distinctive sensory qualities in the cup, resulting from the impeccable match between the Typica-Odaini variety and the peerless Yemeni terroir.

In so doing, too, they contribute to ensuring that the market value attributed to Yemeni coffee is
commensurate to the hard work of generations of Yemeni coffee farmers and the prestige befitting Yemen as the mythical origin of coffee.