What is the effect of the planting place of Yemeni mocha coffee on coffee flavor? Yemen mocha and coffee trade

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Yemen has been mired in years of endless war since 2014. last week, the Geneva-based World Economic Forum released a ranking of the competitiveness of global economies, ranking Yemen at the bottom 137. The World Economic Forum called Yemen a country that has been "further damaged by civil war, economic collapse, cholera and near famine".

But recently, people may have seen hope that things are getting better. According to the Arab media alarabiya, Yemeni Environment and Water Minister Ezzi Shuraim visited Taiz two weeks ago, the first time in recent years that Yemeni government officials have visited the city, which was recently rescued from the armed forces organized by Hussein. Ezzi Shuraim met with the local government and, in addition to discussing the recovery and reconstruction of the city, he mentioned Mocha, a coastal city west of Taiz, and talked about possible future plans to build a desalination plant (Desalination Plant) there.

Coffee lovers may wonder why this seaside town called Mocha has the same name as fancy coffee that everyone loves. The answer is that this is not a coincidence, because the name mocha coffee comes from here, but the connection took place hundreds of years ago.

If you go back to the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Mocha, a port city, was a prosperous trading port with developed maritime trade, and many merchant ships were loaded with the country's wild cocoa-flavored coffee beans that would cross the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. It eventually became a fascinating chocolate-flavored black drink on the European dinner table: coffee.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the beginning of the 18th century was the heyday of coffee trade between Yemen and Europe, which directly laid the foundation of European coffee culture, and later extended to North America, Asia, etc.-it can be said that without the "mocha" of Yemen, coffee, as one of the three major drinks in the world, would not be popular all over the world.

Don't get me wrong, Ethiopia is indeed the hometown of coffee, but according to the World Coffee Research Organization (WCR) historical records, as early as the fifth century BC, the port of Mocha in Yemen welcomed the first batch of coffee beans from Ethiopia, which became the starting point of Yemen's bond with coffee. Coffee appeared for the first time in human history as a drink in the Yemeni city of Zabid.

Coffee research author Mark Pendergrast describes in her book that in 1450, drinking coffee became a necessary lesson for Yemeni Arab Sufi believers before evening prayers to keep a clear head during prayer. This kind of drink, which was originally of a medical or religious nature, quickly entered people's daily life. In 1517, the Ottoman Turks included Yemen in their territory, and the reputation of coffee spread quickly, driven by this once-popular empire.

At the end of the 15th century, Muslim pilgrims further extended coffee to the whole Islamic world. In order to meet the increasing consumer demand, Yemenis began to grow their own coffee, and Yemen became the first country in the world to produce coffee as a crop on a large scale. Soon, it was discovered that the plant could only be grown at high elevations, so the port of Mocha, which is adjacent to the highlands and has a better wharf infrastructure, became the most suitable place to export coffee.