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Yemen coffee has always made headlines for being exquisite and expensive. Exported all over the world, Haraaz coffee from Yemen is known to be an expensive choice of coffee and rarely available in the coffee shops or the aisles of grocery stores.

This delicious cup of goodness is priced at a higher rate because cultivating and exporting the age-old legacy of Yemen also comes with a price.

Let’s glance through a few factors that make the Yemeni coffee and expensive choice of beverage for people and understandably so.

1. Scarcity of the cultivation coffee cultivation takes place in high altitude mountains of Haraaz. Coffee plantation does not grow on a large scale in Yemen. Most of the coffee producers have a maximum of 1000 trees and can go as less as 20 trees on a farm too. The weather in the highlands of mountains also keeps fluctuating leading to spoilage of most of the cultivation. Even after the months of hardships, when the berries are handpicked by the farmers, not all of them are suitable to cut the final export. Many of the coffee cherries are separated in the scrutiny procedures depending upon their quality, colour, shape, and texture. A lot of resources, time, and manpower goes behind a single yield of crops and only a handful of coffee beans are picked for the export. If the beans are not priced at a higher rate, the farmers will not get any return on investment.

2. Loss of coffee cherries: Processing of the coffee beans is an important step in getting the beans ready for exports. Only a handful of coffee cherries are left to go ahead in the further process after the milling step. Speaking in number, if 10kg of red cherries are sent for processing, you will only get 1 kg of dried green beans after milling. This number makes the final yield of about only 10 percent of the total beans that went into milling. The milling and transportation charges. Also, during the process of milling and hulling, a huge amount of coffee beans are leftover and stuck in the machine which leads to a lot of wastage too. The process of separating the good coffee beans and the bad coffee beans mostly becomes a manual task in Yemen.In most of the countries, the water placement method works for testing the good quality beans. Usually, when the beans are placed in the water, defective coffee cherries tend to float being hollow from inside.

   Adhering to the scarcity of water in Yemen, undergoing this process for such a large scale of production is an impossible task. This is why the whole separating part becomes time taking, expensive, and tedious.

3. Infrastructure: The whole process of coffee production in Yemen requires a lot of hands-on attention from the farmers for high-quality beans. The cost of infrastructure for cultivation, fertilizers, water supply, and other resources becomes beyond the reach of the farmers because of their low-income inputs. Yemen Haraaz coffee is still produced using all the ecologically sustainable manner and age-old traditional methods today. Many additional resources can go into uplifting the whole coffee production method in Yemen which could help the local farmers in producing better.The farmers in Yemen do not earn enough to afford the modern technology equipment that can help in making the whole process of growing and exporting coffee an easy task for them.

4. Yemen crippled amidst the war: Exporting coffee from Yemen has always been a challenge for exporters. But the difficulties have been increased since the past few years as the civil war set its pace. There are still many logistical infrastructural and functionality challenges of exporting coffee even now in the country. The Ministry of Agriculture or Ministry of trade is responsible for providing the certificate for coffee containers. A lot goes into getting the most delicious coffee in the world available in your cup from money to efforts to resources, making it one of the most demanding yet expensive coffee in the world.