Sharqi Haraz Washed
A washed coffee from the eastern Haraz mountains, which is unusual in a country that dries almost everything whole. Arrived August 2026, not yet roasted.
Green arrived August 2026 and hasn’t been roasted yet. This page has the provenance and the reason we bought it. The roast profile and the tasting notes go in once there’s a batch behind them, and the arrival is written up in A Washed Yemen Landed.
Why this lot exists at all
Yemen is among the oldest places coffee was grown and traded as a commodity, and for a long stretch it was the only one. Beans left through the port of al-Makha, and the name of that port is where the word mocha comes from.
Getting Yemeni coffee now is a different matter. The country has been at war since 2015. Sample shipping, quality control, and scheduled container movement are all unreliable, and lots that clear the bar for cup quality tend to clear it at prices that make no sense for a roastery this size. This one appeared on a spot list at a workable number, which is most of the reason it’s here.
The part that’s unusual
Yemen dries its coffee whole. The cherry goes onto rooftops and drying beds intact and the fruit comes off at the end, which is a natural process. This is a consequence of climate rather than preference: Yemen is one of the driest coffee origins in the world, and washed processing needs water at the mill for pulping, fermentation, and the washing channels themselves. Most Yemeni farms do not have water to spend that way.
So the flavour profile people associate with Yemeni coffee, the heavy dried fruit and the winey depth, is a mix of the place and the drying method, and the two are almost never separated because a washed version of the same coffee rarely exists to compare against.
This is a washed lot from that region. Taking the dried fruit character out should leave whatever belongs to the terroir behind, which is the thing worth tasting here.
Sharqi means eastern. Sharqi Haraz is the eastern flank of the Haraz mountains, the range that sits between Sana’a and the Red Sea port of Al-Hudaydah. Manakhah is the market town at the middle of it, and the villages around it are built onto rock outcrops with the farmland cut into terraces below them. Those terraces carry coffee and qat alongside the food crops, and this is one of the areas that fed the original Mocha trade.
How we plan to roast it
Near the middle of the house profile to start: first crack around 199 °C and development close to 20%, the same band described on the roasting page. A first batch run at settings we already understand tells us what the coffee does. A bespoke profile invented before the first cupping tells us nothing we can attribute.
That plan may well be wrong, and if it is, the follow-up will say so and show the curve.