The smell of cardamom greets you at the door of Ebreeq Coffee House, a new cafe in Public Square, bringing the world-renowned coffee culture of Yemen to downtown Cleveland.
Yemeni coffee shops are in demand across America, most known for their high-quality coffee drinks, elaborate pastries and late hours, offering the social engagement of coffee house culture as an alternative to alcohol and clubbing nightlife.
Specialty drinks served at Ebreeq include mufawar [moo-FAH-wuhr], Yemeni coffee with cream and cardamom, and qishr [KEE-shur], coffee husks brewed with ginger and cinnamon.
Dia al-Baadani, a co-owner of Ebreeq Coffee House, sat down with Signal Cleveland to share more about the new cafe and talk about what makes Yemeni coffee so respected around the world. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
What makes Yemeni coffee unique?
The way that you process it is a little different. We just plant the trees and don’t add any chemicals to them. You just let it grow the way that it’s supposed to. And then when it’s ready, the cherry that is ready, they hand pick it. So they only pick the good ones that are ready. We don’t let machines get the beans out. When they use machines, they just take everything from the tree, even the cherries that are not ready. Those will make the coffee taste different.
I just wanted to bring this to Cleveland. Give people the experience of a nice coffee with a nice design, late hours, so they can come and enjoy the vibes, enjoy the cup.
Dia al-Baadani, co-owner, Ebreeq Coffee House
The way we do in Yemen, we only pick them by hand, only the ones that are ready. Also the machines can damage the trees, like scratch the surface of the trees. When you pick it by hand, you don’t damage the trees, so the tree keeps giving healthy cherries all the time. We just go by hand, we pick them up, and we put them in the sun. We dry them in the sun for a period of time.
Once it is dried in the sun, it becomes easy to separate, and then we separate it, and then we take it to get grinded, you know, we grind it just like the old way.
Where in Yemen does your coffee come from?
We get it from a specific family. But sometimes the demand gets big, and that family cannot supply everybody. We go to different families but from the same area. But ultimately, sometimes you do have enough inventory that they can supply you with but sometimes you have to go to a different family to get more, because the demand here is becoming big.
The Haraz area is mountainous and good for coffee trees. The good thing about the trees is they don’t need that much water so they don’t need to be watered every day. In Yemen, there is no winter like here. There’s no snow, so you can just plant and forget about it, you know, you don’t worry about they are gonna get destroyed during the winter time. It doesn’t get too hot, it doesn’t get too cold. So normally, the climate over there kind of helps the plants and beans and maintain them through the year. So they don’t need any special treatment to protect them from the winter.
Ongoing wars and humanitarian crises have plagued Yemen for over a decade. In March, the Houthis of Yemen were declared a terrorist organization by the United States government. Have politics and war affected your business?
This really has had a direct effect to our business, but we are dealing with it as we go. We, for example, when we used to make an order, we can get it within a month. But now, because there’s only, like, one port that’s open for trade, we have to make the order three months in advance. There is another one, but it’s where the Houthi group is, and they’re not allowed, nobody’s allowed to do trades from there. So they’re only doing it from Aden.
Sometimes they open [other ports], then they have some issues, they close them, so they’re not stable. The only one that’s constantly open and stable is the one in Aden. Now we try to stack up our inventory, because we know it’s going to take [a while] until the next ship. So that’s all the impact that we have so far. But as far as the farmers and the families, it is no direct, I would say, impact. Even the water [shortage], that’s only in the capital [Sana’a], so they are really not impacted.
The Yemeni port city of Mokha is where the name for the coffee drink “mocha” comes from. What is the status of the port today?
It’s in an area where it’s at risk, so it’s not constantly open.
You’re open fairly late for a coffeehouse in downtown, 10 p.m. What is business like late at night?
This week we’re planning to extend it to 11, and then two weeks later to 12 [midnight]. This is, like, the overseas, the Middle East thing, where we stay late and hang out and all that, so I’m trying to bring that here as well.
In the night, like the weekends, it’s the busiest time for us, because, you know, you see more walking traffic in the downtown. So normally, weekends are the busiest place for us, especially at night.
We’re open late, a lot of places are closed, so they can find us open and when they come in, they become our customers. When they come in once and you get coffee, we, you know, we know that they’re gonna come back. So our goal is just to try to bring them once, have them taste the coffee to earn customers.