Why Yemen?

The score and ranking of last year’s Yemen coffee on Coffee Review’s Top 30 coffees of the Year in 2024.

NOTE 11/10/2025: The purpose of this blog that I wrote over a year ago, was to highlight coffee from Yemen and explain why I decided to make coffee from Yemen the debut coffee for Chuck’s Roast.

For the first month of Chuck’s Roast’s existence, all we offered was one coffee from Yemen and it did very well for us, scoring 96 on coffee review and ending up placing number 4 in the world on Coffee Review’s annual Top 30 List.

Unfortunately, we could not secure the Haraaz Red this year from Cafe Imports so I spent a lot of time cupping samples searching for a replacement but found nothing suitable to feature in 2025.

I had just about given up and then I connected with Reef Mokha out of Yemen who hooked me up with an astounding Anaerobic lot from Amin Al-Marwani’s farm in Bani-Matar. It may be one of the best coffees from Yemen I have had, luxurious, adventurous, astounding.

This is an ultra rare coffee, only produced in small quantities. We are lucky to have it and proud to offer it to you this year. Reef Mokha supports these small independent coffee growers financially so that they can focus on producing exceptional coffee. The financial support helps the growers to obtain water, for example, which is, as you can imagine, not easy to come by in Yemen.

The coffee is currently available and the first few roast dates are scheduled here.

You may be asking yourself, why would a coffee roaster launch a coffee roasting website with just one coffee? And….why Yemen?

A coffee from Yemen is our debut coffee here at Chuck’s Roast for one simple reason:  Long ago, a Yemeni coffee changed my perception of what coffee could be.

Prior to tasting it, I had a pretty good idea about what coffee was.  A typical washed specialty coffee from, say, Colombia is predictable in some ways.  It is going to be a lovely drinking experience; one can expect balance, roundness, some fruit like orange in the cup and maybe a bit of chocolate.  It will have a nice clean finish.  Similar can be said for most “typical” well-grown, harvested, processed coffees from MOST coffee growing countries.  Our expectations of what it will taste like are usually spot on if we have been tasting them for years.

Nothing, however, could prepare for that Yemen coffee.  I assumed it would be like a “typical” dry-processed coffee from Ethiopia, sweet, dried blueberries and maybe raspberries, clean with good body. While the Yemen offered some of these flavors it seemed to open up an entirely new flavor wheel for me: Leather, cardamon, anise, figs, tobacco, preserved lemons, black pepper…huh?

It blew my mind and reset my tasting calibration for every coffee I have tasted since.   In some ways throughout the years of sourcing coffee, cupping 1000s and 1000s of samples, I have subconsciously compared everything I ever cupped to that one coffee, a fools errand, for sure.

The coffee was that much of a life-changer for me.

In Yemen, many face profound poverty, food insecurity, drought, and on-going wars. It is no wonder that securing coffee from Yemen is such a challenge and that arrival lots to the USA so often fall short of expectations.  But Yemen was the first county to commercialize coffee and as a crop it is still a source of pride for the people in Yemen — and rightly so.

The coffee is expensive but unfortunately that does not mean that the coffee farmers are making a lot of money.  There simply is not much of it grown — especially when compared to major coffee producers like Kenya or Ethiopia — so it is rare and rarity usually means expensive.   The lack of infrastructure makes processing coffee more expensive than other countries, and cost to transport coffee to port and from port can be very expensive as well, all adding to the cost per pound green.  Sadly,  when the quality control is missing — which is often the case in Yemen — a coffee roaster could very easily end up with very expensive, very bad coffee that is un-sellable, or maybe sellable once to customers who will never buy it again.  Not good.

But luckily there are some organizations, Yemeni exporters/millers, and importers working to both improve the quality and consistency of the coffee and to insure that a bit more money ends up in the hands of the people who are growing it. In this case, Cafe Imports is working with Mahal Aqeequl drying station in Yemen to pay farmers a premium for delivering perfectly ripe coffee cherries and then processing the coffee carefully under elevated quality control.   

The result is “Haraaz Red” a brand BRCR started buying many years ago.  Quality slipped a bit for a couple years but when it came to starting this venture, Cafe Imports was the first importer I reached out to and they kindly sent me a sample.  It was fantastic.  Really lovely.  For me it makes perfect sense to kick off Chuck’s Roast with this wonderful coffee so we bought a small amount, about 60 pounds green, but when it is gone it is gone.  No more of this crop is available.

So for now, let’s just enjoy this one and lets enjoy the start of this coffee journey. 

Cheers

-Chuck