There's a Yemeni coffee shop boom in Milwaukee — and around the country — and WUWM is on it!
Our first stop on the tour — Haraz Coffee House
Haraz is a newish spot on Milwaukee’s east side, on the corner of Oakland and Locust near UW-Milwaukee. Owner Mahdi Hassan is a third-generation Palestinian who opened the coffeehouse to create more of a social scene near the UWM campus. “We’re pretty much available to people from seven in the morning 'til midnight,” he explains.
Haraz has floor-to-ceiling windows, and the seating area is nice and cozy. It has small tables and wicker seats. One wall features a colorful mural of a coffee farmer working the coffee fields in the mountains.
What's so special about Yemeni coffee?
“It's a region that has a high altitude, which kind of works,” says Hassan. “It's actually better for the beans. So, it gives that acidity, wine taste to the bean. So, the region itself kind of helps the beans actually grow better, and it has a unique taste to it compared to the other beans.”
Turns out, Yemen is one of the oldest coffee regions in the world. It’s where one of the world’s most popular coffee beans — Arabica coffee — were first cultivated. Farmers in Yemen sun dry the beans.
Haraz takes those coffee beans and makes all kinds of drinks and treats. WUWM’s Maayan Silver asks Hassan for advice on what to order. He suggests his most popular drink with Middle Easterners: Turkish coffee (made with Yemeni beans).
What we drank: #1 Turkish coffee (made with Yemeni beans)
To make Turkish coffee, you boil very finely ground coffee powder with water in a special pot. You pour the coffee into small cups and sip it slowly, leaving the coffee grounds at the bottom. Hassan says it’s different from really milky espresso drinks like lattes.
“That’s what I like about it. I don’t want to say lattes aren’t made fresh, but they get cold a little too quickly, depending on if you’re on the move or not. But with traditional drinks like Turkish coffee, literally, the cup will be boiling hot for hours and hours,” Hassan says.
That’s the idea — sitting around with your company of choice and engaging with them for hours. Hassan gives us a copper tray with designs on it, a little copper coffee pot and two copper cups. It’s a mix of medium roast and dark roast.
WUWM reporter Eddie Morales has one request: “I like things to taste as sweet as possible, but without being very sugary. So I’ve kind of switched from using real sugar to stevia and stuff lately at home. But I’m open to a little bit of sugar, though, just to make it taste sweeter.”
Lucky for Turkish coffee drinkers, it comes unsweetened, so you can set the sugar levels yourself. “It’s very hot, but I get that — sipping on it over a long period of time. It’s really nice,” Eddie says.
There’s even cardamom in there, one of the spices you’ll often taste in Yemeni coffees and teas.
What we drank: #2 Adeni tea
Adeni tea is milky black tea flavored with cardamom, nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves.
"At Haraz, we're really known for the Adeni tea, which literally has our spices, and it actually comes with, like a black tea base," says Hassan. "So that's actually our most popular one. Again, it does have a little bit of sweetness, but it's not an overpowering sweetness. So a lot of people love that drink."
There's a lot more to choose from!
Here's Haraz's menu.
Yemeni coffee houses are also known for their sweets — the display case at Haraz is full of cakes, like cheesecake or chocolate cake cups. Hassan tells us about one signature pastry called "bee bites." It’s usually shaped like a triangle.
“So bee bites is a traditionally… bread, basically, that's actually filled with cream cheese, and it's drizzled with honey. It's really known in Yemen. In Arabic, it's called, khaliat nahal, which is like the… [honeycomb],” he says.
