Maram Al-Yazji

Maram Al-Yazji · Single Farmer Lot · Deep Fermentation · Yemenia · Hijrat Al Ain, Hayma Dakhiliya, Sana'a

This is Maram Al-Yazji's first Best of Yemen, and she arrives at it with thirty five years of farming behind her. She learned coffee from her mother as much as from her father, on the terraces of Bait Al-Yaziji, and that is where she farms still.

The village has changed around her. Qat used to dominate these fields, and coffee has been quietly taking their place, planted by families who have worked the same slopes for generations. The work divides the way it always has here, with the women leading the harvesting and the drying while the men prepare the soil and keep the irrigation running.

Maram keeps around three hundred and fifty trees between 2,000 and 2,300 metres, most of them past thirty years old, with bananas growing between the rows. Harvests on terraces this high are never large, and they are still what the household lives on. Asked what keeps her at it, she names her children.

Her village is no stranger to the auction. The women of Bait Al-Yaziji placed eighth in 2025, so the relatives and neighbours she has picked alongside for decades have already shown what this ground can do. Her own name had simply never been on a lot before.

What she wants is to remain a coffee farmer, with trees that keep producing. From someone thirty five years in, that is less a wish than a plan.