Saleh Al Ofairi

Saleh Al Ofairi · Single Farmer Lot · Deep Fermentation · SL28 · Bani Ofair, Maghrib Ans, Dhamar

In Bani Ofair, Saleh Al Ofairi's father was the man other farmers came to for advice about coffee. That was the household Saleh grew up in, one that both lived off coffee income and was expected to know more about it than the neighbours did.

Forty five years later he runs a farm of more than a thousand trees, a mix of old ones and recent plantings, worked by twenty three producing members of a family of twenty five. His problem is no longer knowledge or land. It is hands. The farm now grows more coffee than the family can comfortably pick, and finding labour at the right moment in the season is the thing most likely to cost him quality.

He is unusually even handed about specialty coffee. He says the value and the price are fairer than the commercial market offers, and in the same breath that it demands more work and more money to reach that standard. Both are true, and he does it anyway. What he singles out about the auction is that the coffee goes out under his own name.

The coffee was deep fermented, the ripest cherries slow dried over more than thirty days for depth and body. The variety is SL28, identified in Kenya in the 1930s from drought resistant material, though most Arabica traces its line back to Yemen. In these western mountains SL28 has adapted closely to the terroir, on dry, high ground that suits it, and it is rustic enough to be left untended for years and still come back into production, which is precisely what farming these terraces asks of a tree.