This coffee is produced by legacy farmers of various sizes in the Mattari-Sayhee mountain valley, in western Yemen’s Sana’a Governorate. Coffee-growing families in this part of Yemen, similar to many others across the country, tend parcels of terraced land passed through many generations. Coffee is the one crop that continues to survive all others, both for the livelihood it provides as well as a being a deep social tradition that keeps communities together. “Matari” is a term of terroir distinction, similar to “Kona”, that refers to high-quality heirloom coffee varieties produced in the unique climate and soil of this part of Sana’a, where subtropical conditions and available water springs allow coffee farmers to irrigate—something almost unheard of in the majority of coffee-producing areas in Yemen.
All Mattari coffee, as traditionally everywhere in Yemen, is processed as a natural: hand-picked, sorted for consistency, and dried in a single layer in full sun on raised beds or rooftops. And due to the arid climate and slow maturation patterns, coffee is picked almost year round. This particular Mattari blend is carefully curated by Pearl of Tehama from 98 of their partner farmers in the Mattari-Sayhee valley, where households typically manage 200-1000 coffee trees apiece. In addition to coffee, in this micro-climate it’s common to see farmers growing sorghum, corn, alfalfa, cowpeas and beans, millet, a small numbers of fruit trees, and livestock not only for income but as a source of fertilizer as well.
Pearl of Tehama, the miller and exporter who manages all transportation, milling, and exporting of partner farms’ coffee, is a family business founded in 1970. For many years, all coffee was exported under the name of the family patriarch and founder, Ali Hiba Muslot. After his death in 1980 his three sons continued using the family name until 2012, when the family business, including other trades and retail, was split up. The coffee export business was reborn as Pearl of Tehama for Import, Export, and C.A.S, and is still owned by Ms. Fatoum Muslot, the late Muslot’s daughter. Fatoum’s eldest son, Yasser Al-Khaderi, is the company’s general manager.
Royal has been working with the extended Muslot family since the late 1980s. See HERE for Bob’s personal memoir of the ongoing relationship, and HERE for Mayra’s interview with Fatoum Muslot herself to learn more about the family’s ongoing mission in her own words.
Yemen is the oldest territory on Earth to cultivate coffee. Its seed stock, originally transported from wild arabica landraces in Ethiopia, was used to create the world’s first ever coffee farms where coffee would be grown commercially for trade across the Arabian peninsula and eventually mainland Europe. (“Arabica” itself referred to the Arabian coffee supply that was the West’s first in history.)
Maintaining coffee trees in a climate as harsh and uniquely challenging as Yemen’s western and northern ranges requires the kind of proven techniques that only generations of farming can bestow. Coffee farms are iconically terraced on arid, incredibly steep slopes. Where irrigation is not available, bore holes are dug manually into the rock to access individual water reserves for each tree wherever rain is scarce. Coffee trees are spaced generously, about 1000 per hectare (compared to 4000-6000 common in Latin America), both by necessity on the narrow terraces, as well as for better groundwater access and erosion control. Raising young coffee trees is a matter of hardening them for a lifetime of vicious elements and water scarcity. Older coffee trees become very spacious and tall, and often end up hanging their branches over the terrace edge, known locally as “hanging gardens”. Above the coffee, shade trees are carefully selected and positioned for how well they block water evaporation. As can be imagined, productivity is very low in such conditions. And still, over one million people work in Yemen’s coffee trade, from farm to export.
Yemen’s ongoing civil war has not stopped the Muslot family and Pearl of Tehama from dutifully managing and exporting the coffee harvests of the farms and families they represent; something they can be very proud of given the conflict’s overwhelmingly ruinous effect on much of Yemen’s international trade. Not only this, but Pearl of Tehama has established a consultancy for other service providers in coffee, particularly exporters, to help expand Yemen’s coffee sector safety net and even increase the coffee’s availability and competitiveness abroad. Consulting covers the management of traceable harvest information, preparing technical reports from the field, correspondence with farmers and customer relationship management, harvest and processing calibration, and more. The guiding mission is to increase potential at both ends of the value chain: more available quality coffee from throughout Yemen’s historic producing territories; and greater buyer appetite all over the world thanks to expertly managed, traceable coffees being marketed.
