The road from Manakha is one switchback stacked on top of another, cut into a mountainside that falls almost vertically into a valley the color of kiln-fired clay. There are terraces everywhere. They climb the slopes in shallow steps, held up by dry-stone walls built by men whose great-grandfathers built the walls above them. Some are planted in qat. Most, still, are planted in coffee.
Ali al-Haraibi grows coffee on fourteen of these terraces. His family has grown coffee on them since the 17th century — a claim he states without drama, the way a European farmer might mention a grandfather. His oldest tree, a Udaini whose trunk has split into four and been held together with wire, is, by his estimate, between eighty and a hundred years old. It still fruits. The cherries, when they ripen in November, are small, dense, and almost black before they are picked.
This is the coffee that, according to every credible account, first traveled from Ethiopia across the Red Sea in the 15th century, was cultivated at scale in these very mountains by Sufi orders in Mocha and Sana’a, and from there spread to Constantinople, Cairo, Venice, and, eventually, the rest of the world. The word coffee itself passed through Arabic qahwa on its way to every European language. The port of Al-Mokha gave its name, improbably and permanently, to a flavor that has almost nothing to do with what is grown here.
“Everything that coffee ever became, it became here first,” Ali says, standing on a terrace at two thousand meters with his hand resting on a tree his grandfather pruned. “The rest of the world is still working from our notes.”
The terraces and the wind
Haraz coffee is unlike anything else because Haraz is unlike anywhere else. The terraces face in every direction at once. The altitude is extreme. The annual rainfall is low — perhaps five hundred millimeters a year — and arrives almost entirely in two short seasons. The trees, as a result, grow slowly, fruit sparsely, and produce cherries with almost impossibly concentrated sugars.
The other defining factor is the wind. It comes off the Red Sea in the afternoons, rises up the western escarpment, and cools the terraces just as the sun begins to pull moisture out of the drying cherries. The coffee is always dried as natural — the whole cherry laid out on the flat roofs of stone houses, turned by hand, never washed. The wind dries it slowly. The sugar in the cherry seeps into the bean over thirty days or more. What emerges is a coffee that is dense, winey, and unmistakably of this place: dried apricot, cardamom, and a fig-like sweetness that roasters outside Yemen spend their careers trying to reproduce by other means.
A market that almost disappeared
For most of the past decade, Haraz coffee was close to invisible on the international specialty market. The war, which began in 2015, closed the ports intermittently, made internal logistics nearly impossible, and drove many farmers to replace their coffee trees with qat, which is faster to harvest, does not require export infrastructure, and sells into a domestic market that never shut down.
What changed, starting around 2019, was a small group of Yemeni exporters — several of them women, most of them in their thirties — who began consolidating microlots from farms like Ali’s and shipping them, through Djibouti and Oman, to specialty roasters in Seoul, Berlin, and Melbourne. The prices they secured were, by any historical standard, astonishing. A lot from the village of Bani Matar sold in 2022 for a hundred and fourteen dollars per pound at a private auction. Ali does not sell into those auctions directly — he does not have to. A share of the premium flows back to him through the export cooperative in Sana’a, which pays in dollars, in advance of the harvest, against a sample.
“The coffee,” he says, “is the same. The world has started listening.”
The old names
The varietals here are not the ones that show up in the standard coffee literature. They are Udaini, Dawairi, Tuffahi, Ja’adi — names that predate any botanical taxonomy, given by farmers who were categorizing trees on the basis of leaf shape and cherry flavor centuries before the word varietal existed in any European language. Some of them correspond, roughly, to the Typica family. Others do not correspond to anything else on earth.
In 2021, a team of researchers from the World Coffee Research project sequenced the genomes of fifty-three Yemeni landrace samples. They found, among other things, a cluster of trees in the Haraz highlands that appeared to represent a lineage that had diverged from all other known arabica populations at least six hundred years ago — effectively, a genetic record of the original crossing from Ethiopia, preserved by isolation.
Ali was not surprised. He had been calling these trees mother coffee for his entire life.
What the cup says
In the courtyard of his house, on the evening I visit, Ali makes coffee in the old way — whole beans pounded in a wooden mortar, boiled with water and a cracked pod of cardamom in a long-handled brass pot, poured into small glasses without handles. It is served sweet. It is drunk quickly. The cup is cloudy with sediment.
It is, by any measure that would apply at a specialty cupping table, improperly prepared coffee. It is also one of the most delicious things I have ever had in my mouth. The apricot is there. The fig is there. The wind is there, somehow, in the finish — cool, dry, and insistent, like the smell of a terrace at dusk.
“You taste it,” Ali says, watching me.
I do.
“Good,” he says. “Now you know.”