Nasir Al-Lahaba

Nasir Al-Lahaba · Single Farmer Lot · Natural · Yemenia · Bait Alal, Hayma Kharijiya, Sana'a

Long before any specialty company came to Bait Alal, Nasir Al-Lahaba was picking only the ripe cherries. His children make a point of this. There was no premium to chase at the time and no buyer asking him for it, and he did it anyway, because he had decided that was how coffee should be picked.

He is not here for this auction. Nasir died having spent some seventy years in coffee, and the farm has passed to a family of thirty six children and grandchildren. Around nine hundred trees stand on it, most of them over fifty years old, and a great many were put in the ground by him. He supervised every stage of production himself, to the end.

What he taught them, he had learned from his own father, who was known in the village for sharing what he knew with anyone who asked. It came down to one instruction: be gentle with the coffee trees, and always take care of them. He also wanted Yemeni coffee to be recognised properly abroad so that the farmers growing it would finally be paid what it was worth, and he lived to see some of that. He placed in the Best of Yemen several times, his best a seventh in 2023.

The work his family has inherited includes the thing he never finished. The water does not yet reach every plot, and extending it is the next job on a farm that still bears his name.