We're super privileged to be roasting this coffee for our advent calendar this year. While Ethiopia is famous for being the origin of Arabica coffee, Yemen was the first place in the world that coffee was farmed. Exporting coffee from Yemen is a complex business, and finding something that meets modern specialty coffee's stringent demands for traceability is also rare. This coffee comes from Bani Matar, and is a mix of the Ismaili, Typica, Matari and Bourbon varieties. Water scarcity means that all coffee in Yemen is naturally processed, dried out in the sun, and this gives Yemeni coffees their unique, funky flavour profile. We taste nutty notes of hazelnuts and oak next to a prune-like acidity and stewed fruits. The body and finish are nicely balanced, with a delicate flavour of cloves. This Matari-Sayhee coffee comes from a gently sloping valley in the traditional coffee growing region of Bani Matar. Al-Sayh, as the valley is know, lies between 1500 and 1700 meters above sea level, with subtropical conditions that see around 300mm of rain in spring and summer and a very dry autumn and winter. The region is blessed with a permanent spring in the higher parts of the valley, enabling the coffee to enjoy generous irrigation, a rarity in Yemen and something that ensures the quality of the coffee harvest. Pearl of Tehama is the exporter of this coffee, and they've done a lot of groundbreaking work in the collection and traceability of their coffees, a historically complex undertaking in Yemen. The Matari-Sayhee comes from five villages, locally known as Mahlah, where 45 farmers form the group that grows this coffee that is then exporter by Pearl of Tehama. Each farm is run by up to 18 households, who tend to the coffee trees on terraced plots along the sides of the valley. This growing technique is unique to Yemen, and the landscape is spectacular, the terraces stacked along the mountainside, each level holding anything from 10 to 100 trees.