Hifthallah Al-Haymi

Hifthallah Al-Haymi · Single Farmer Lot · Deep Fermentation · Yemenia · Aljidan, Hayma Kharijiya, Sana'a

When Hifthallah Al-Haymi's father and brothers left Aljidan for Sana'a to grow vegetables, the coffee farm was left to him. He was young for it, and he says he was nervous at first, but he had no interest in going with them. He stayed and took over the running of the place.

His mother is the reason it worked. She talked him through the first seasons, watered the trees with him and picked alongside him, and she still helps on the farm today. He grew up among those trees with his brothers, and he was the one who chose to keep them.

Aljidan has grown coffee for more than four hundred years. It is a village of roughly fifty coffee farming families at 2,200 metres, working some of the smallest plots in Yemen, where summers are hot and wet and winters turn bitterly cold. Hifthallah farms with three others and supports a household of eight, growing qat, sorghum and maize alongside the coffee. Water is the constant problem, and disease in the trees, al kharaz in particular, is the other. This lot was deep fermented, the ripest cherries slow dried for more than thirty days to build depth and body into the cup.

He won the Best of Yemen outright in 2022, the top lot of that year's auction, and returned to it in 2023. He was in his early twenties then, running a farm he had chosen to stay for. "Coffee is the present and the future," he says.