Received 7/17/2010
Roast Profile: Bold Bright Sweet & Fruity Body. Variegated Roast Color, Sweetness: Sun-Dried Cherry-Sweet.
Raved about in the April 2007 edition of Gourmet Magazine!
This is an extremely sweet, fruity sharp Arabian coffee blend. Mocha Yemen Sinani, wine-like Horse Harar, and dry-processed Ethiopian Yirgacheffe are combined in equal parts to create this coffee. Distinct with the smell of ripe, wild coffee fruit, Yemen coffee is characterized by musky fruitiness and earthiness, sweet and spicy. Arabian Coffee from Yemen is one of the more distinctive-tasting coffees in the world. The acidity is bright and complex, and the flavor alive with notes that range from candied fruit through wine to dark chocolate, roasted nuts, wood, and tobacco.
The Republic of Yemen is a country located on the Arabian Peninsula in Southwest Asia (the Middle East), bordered on the west by the Red Sea. The earliest credible evidence of coffee drinking appears in the middle of the fifteenth century, in the Sufi monasteries of the Yemen in southern Arabia. Almost all Yemen coffee comes from ancient varieties of coffee arabica grown nowhere else in the world except perhaps in eastern Ethiopia; virtually all Yemen coffee comes from "heirloom" varieties of coffee arabica first naturalized hundreds of years ago. It is the world's most traditional coffee, extremely popular everywhere "Turkish" style coffee is drunk.
Yemen coffee is grown almost exactly as it was hundreds of years ago, on terraces clinging to the sides of semiarid mountains. In the summer, when the scrubby little coffee trees are blossoming and setting fruit, misty rains temporarily turn the Yemen mountains bright green. In the fall, the clouds dissipate and the air turns bone dry as the coffee fruit ripens, is picked, and appears on the roofs of the stone houses, spread in the sun to dry. Yemen coffees are dry or natural coffees, dried with the fruit still attached to the beans. Ripe coffee cherries are processed as they have been for centuries, dried in thin layers on rooftops, husked by millstone, and winnowed and cleaned by hand. |