Yemeni coffees are like no other. Maybe that’s a good thing. For the most part, there are no real coffee farms in YemenYemen has a coffee culture like no other place, and perhaps some of what we enjoy in this cup is due to their old style of trade...: Technically,..., not like Central America and such. Yemeni coffee is often grown on terraces that a family has a right to farm. It competes with Qat for water, and since the advent of cheap portable drilling equipment, so many wells were dug that the water table fell precipitously. That’s bad in a country that already is in a 500 year drought cycle. You can see many signs of drought in the green coffeeGreen coffee refers to the processed seed of the coffee tree fruit. Coffee is a flowering shrub that produces fruit. The seeds of the fruit are processed, roasted,... shown here. It is also a rusticA general characterization of pleasantly "natural" flavors, less sophisticated and less refined, but appealing. : What is Rustic? This is a general term we came up with... Dried... dry-processed coffee, laid out on the rooftop with the entire fruit intact. This means that there is no machine intervention to remove defective beans. It is also an old trading system where a coffee might be bought and sold 5 to 10 times before it is readied for export. Good coffee can be mixed with bad, old crop with new, and what you end up with is the most well-shuffled coffee in the world. Shown here is a coffee we did not buy, but you might find all of these defects or more even in the better Yemeni coffees we stock.