A Washed Yemen Landed

Two boxes came off the Royal spot list this week. One is a honey-processed Uganda from the Rwenzori range. The other is a washed Yemen from the Sharqi Haraz Cooperative, and that one is the reason for this post.

Neither has been through the roaster yet. This is the note that gets written before the work, not after it, so there are no tasting notes here and no curve. Both of those come later, once there’s something measured to publish.

What arrived

• Yemen Washed Sharqi Haraz Cooperative, lot 39817-1
• Uganda Honey Rwenzori Mountains, lot 39618-1

Both are Crown Jewels, which is Royal’s program for small lots they’ve bought in quantities too small to sell by the container. That matters for a roastery this size. A full container of an expensive coffee is not a purchase we can make, and without a program that breaks lots down to the box, most of what’s interesting never reaches anyone operating at our scale.

Yemen is the hard one to get

Coffee has been grown and traded commercially in Yemen for longer than almost anywhere. The port of al-Makha handled so much of the early export trade that its name, worn down through a few centuries of European spelling, is why a chocolate coffee drink is called a mocha today. The connection to chocolate came later and by accident. The name is a shipping record.

The modern reality is less romantic. Yemen has been at war since 2015, and the export logistics that a specialty buyer depends on, the sample shipping, the quality control, the ability to move a container on a schedule, are all difficult or intermittent. Yemeni coffee that arrives with both good cup quality and a price a small roaster can pay is rare. It shows up on an inventory sheet occasionally and then it’s gone.

So the first reason to buy this was availability. It was there, and it usually isn’t.

The washed part is the interesting part

Here is what makes this lot odd rather than merely scarce.

Yemeni coffee is overwhelmingly dry-processed. The cherry is picked and dried whole, often on the flat rooftops of the farm buildings, and the fruit is removed only at the end. That isn’t a stylistic choice. Yemen is one of the driest coffee-producing countries in the world, and washed processing needs a great deal of water at the mill, for the pulping and the fermentation tanks and the washing channels. In most of the country that water isn’t available to spend on coffee.

The result is that “Yemeni coffee” and “natural process” have been close to synonymous for most of the history of the trade. The heavy, dried-fruit, winey character people associate with Yemen is partly the terroir and partly the processing, and the two are hard to separate because there’s almost never a washed version of the same coffee to compare against.

This lot is that comparison. Same region, same cooperative structure, washed instead. Whatever’s left when you take the dried fruit character away is the part that belongs to Yemen itself rather than to the drying yard.

Sharqi means eastern. Sharqi Haraz is the eastern side of the Haraz mountains, inland and west of Sana’a, an area of steep terraced farms worked mostly in small plots by families who have been on that ground a long time.

What happens next

The plan is deliberately boring. We’ll roast it near the middle of the house profile first, somewhere close to the 199 °C first crack and roughly 20% development that the roasting page describes, because the point of a first batch is to find out what the coffee does under conditions we already understand. Guessing at a bespoke profile before you’ve tasted anything just produces a result you can’t attribute to a cause.

Then we’ll cup it, adjust, and write the follow-up with the curve attached. If the washed processing does what it should, the interesting question is whether the Yemen character survives without the fruit doing the heavy lifting. That’s worth finding out, and it’s the sort of thing this journal exists to record.

The Uganda gets the same treatment. It’s a honey process from the Rwenzori mountains on the Congolese border, which is a different range from the Mount Elgon slopes that produce our Mbale lot, and it will be worth putting the two Ugandas side by side once both are roasted.

Both origin pages are up now with the provenance we have, and they’ll be filled in with roast data and notes once there’s data to fill them with.