We are honored to bring you Port of Mokha, lot SH5 from Al-Durrar Yemen and Mokhtar Alkhanshali.  This coffee is both beautiful and vital to the producers and people of Yemen.  With the threats to coffee of war, cattle farming, or land development, small holder farms are being crowded out and destroyed at an alarming rate and that culture of coffee production is being lost for future generations.

We at Mudhouse Coffee Roasters could not be more proud to share this coffee with you, in part because of its incredible quality, but also because of its important story.

Port of Mokha

Origin: Yemen Region: Al-Durrar Producer: Shayba Varietal: Udaini Varietal (Ancient Typica) Altitude: 2,150 masl Processing: Sun-Dried Natural

Mokhtar Alkhanshali, whose family is from Yemen, discovered specialty coffee in 2013. He was unable to find a coffeehouse in his home city of San Francisco that carried a coffee from his ancestral homeland, and was determined to figure out why. He discovered that Yemeni coffee farmers had little incentive to increase production. There was, for starters, the instability of the commodities market, as well as a lack of understanding of the export process, and finally the reality that it was more profitable and stable to grow khat instead. Mokhtar’s life trajectory was changed at this point, and he has since literally risked his life in the pursuit of saving a dying agricultural industry in a country that is undergoing civil war and unrest.  This is an important coffee and an important story.