Aljidan XV

Aljidan XV · Community Lot · Alchemy XV · Yemenia · Aljidan, Hayma Kharijiya, Sana'a

The best coffee in Yemen this year came from a village of about fifty farming families. Aljidan XV scored 90.22 points and took first place, and it is the second year running that the top lot has come off these terraces, after Yahya Al-Faqeeh won the 2025 auction from the same village.

Aljidan is small in a way that is difficult to convey. It sits at 2,200 metres, it has grown coffee for more than four hundred years, and the plots are startling: some of them no bigger than a room. Add every farm together and the village holds a little over seven thousand coffee trees. Many are more than a century old, and the older farmers will tell you some are past a hundred and fifty.

Which is why this is a community lot. Nobody here has the ground to fill one alone, so the winning coffee is the work of the whole village, picked to a single standard across dozens of tiny holdings. Every family in it had to get the harvest right for the lot to score what it did.

The processing is Alchemy XV, the second protocol in the series. It opens with carbonic maceration, a sealed and gas regulated fermentation, then layers a dedicated anaerobic stage on top of it, so the lift of the earlier protocol sits on a deeper base.