NEKISSE

   The Ninety Plus Gesha Estates were designed with inspiration drawn from coffee growing wild in its natural habitat in Ethiopia. The Gesha variety, along with all heirloom coffee varieties, comes from the understory of wild forests in Ethiopia. These heirloom varieties of coffee live very long lives – up to 100 years or more – and produce relatively small amounts of intensely aromatic coffee. With its first significant production in 2014, coffee from Ninety Plus Gesha Estates was used to win the first of 5 World Brewers Cup Championships in 6 years year to date (2020). Ninety Plus Gesha Estates proves that coffee can be utilized to reforest and sustain tropical lands while producing the highest valued coffees in the world.
   In 2005, Ninety Plus Founder, Joseph Brodsky, traveled to Ethiopia for the first time and decided to make it home for the coming years, having fallen in love with the people, the food, the language, the culture, and the semi-forested coffee lands in Ethiopia’s southwest.
   Ninety Plus Founder, Joseph Brodsky, moved to Ethiopia in 2006 to start Ninety Plus. He lived full-time in Ethiopia for 2 years, fermenting and drying coffees with his own hands and intuition.
   Nekisse – formerly Beloya – was the first coffee Ninety Plus developed in Ethiopia, and in 2007, it was the first coffee to score 97 points on Coffee Review.
   These tiny batches (the Aricha and Beloya Micro Selections) were first taken on a tour to specialty roasters in the Nordic countries who hadn’t tasted natural processed coffees of this level prior. They quickly became the choice of national barista champions who featured them on the World Barista Competition stage in Copenhagen in 2008. These coffees were the first single-origin, natural process coffees to be presented in the World Barista Championships and were the precursors of the current Panama Nekisse.