Yahya Al-Lahaba

Yahya Al-Lahaba · Single Farmer Lot · Deep Fermentation · Yemenia · Bait Alal, Hayma Kharijiya, Sana'a

Yahya Al-Lahaba's father died when he was young, and it was his mother who held the farm together. She handled the money and the land until he was old enough to run it himself, and she taught him all of it, cultivating, pruning, picking. He says she was the strongest person he ever knew.

He went on to win the first Best of Yemen. His lot took the top place of the 2020 auction and he put the money straight back into the ground, planting more seedlings, expanding the farm and sharpening his technique. The following year he placed third.

For most of the fifty years he has been farming, his coffee left the valley without his name on it, sold by weight into the commercial market where the care he took made no difference to the price. Specialty coffee, he says, is what finally revealed a quality that had been there all along.

Seven hundred trees stand on the farm now, old, middle aged and young, worked by eighteen members of the family with the jobs divided between them. What he wants next is to be one of the best known farmers in the country, and his route there is attention rather than acreage, chasing every detail that shows up in the cup. Labour is scarce at harvest, pests take their share, and the water is never enough.

The lot was deep fermented, the ripest cherries slow dried for more than thirty days for depth and body. What he means to hand his children is what his mother handed him: the knowledge, and the trees.