Bait Yaseen XI

Bait Yaseen XI · Community Lot · Alchemy XI · Yemenia · Bait Yaseen, Hayma Dakhiliya, Sana'a

Bait Yaseen is barely a village. A handful of stone houses stand on the terraces, with the old Al Hujlah fortress on the ridge above them, and the place still carries the name of the family that first settled it. For somewhere this small, it has an unreasonable habit of finishing near the top of the Best of Yemen. Its XI lot came fourth in 2025.

The village sits within Bani Al-Siyagh, a sub district of Hayma Dakhiliya where more than three hundred families produce coffee on ground that runs from 1,600 to 2,350 metres. Most farmers here inherited their trees along with the valley they grow in, and many of those trees are old. The newer ones stand on ground that used to hold qat, which farmers have been steadily clearing since specialty buyers gave them a reason to. The limit now is land itself. There is no more of it, and what there is has to contend with al kharaz and with water that never quite arrives in the quantity needed.

This lot was processed with Alchemy XI, the protocol that began the series in 2021. Its centrepiece is carbonic maceration, a fermentation carried out in a sealed, gas regulated environment, followed by a closely managed drying sequence that holds on to what the fermentation built. It is the most aromatic and clearly defined of the Alchemy family.

Bait Yaseen has sent coffee to every auction since 2022. What the farmers say they value is not only the price but the fact that their story travelled with the coffee.