Figuring out how I want to roast a couple of the new coffees that arrived yesterday. I'm starting with a Yemen Mocha Hawari. From a purely physical perspective, this is the best Yemeni coffee I've had in my shop, also the most expensive.
As usual, I'm starting by evaluating the coffee across a range of roasts that I hope extends from too light to too dark. In this case, 10 different roast levels. The first two are thin and vegetal, lacking in the qualities that I want out of this coffee. The last two start to get smoky and leathery, which is also not quite what I want, but cups 3-8 are quite pleasant with honey and chocolate attributes.
Cup 8 would be a dark roast if I decided to go with that. Medium-heavy body, low acidity, bittersweet chocolate flavor attributes. Cup 6 would be a medium roast. This one is exceptionally well balanced, preserving the honey attribute and the chocolate expressed as more of a milk chocolate. The main deficiency there is a slightly low overall intensity of flavor that I think I can fix with a profile tweak. I'm going to try that for my first production test batch.
Most of my experience with Yemeni coffee is very small seeds lacking uniformity in size with a high proportion harvested from unripe fruit. The coffee I'm tasting today is larger (though still on the small side for my shop), more uniform, and from ripe cherries.