NINETY PLUS

Expect a cup bursting with vibrant flavour. The high sweetness is reminiscent of the ripest tropical fruit. Fresh citrus, nectarine, and cantaloupe melon follow. The acidity is juicy and complex, filling the palate. As it cools, the profile lingers with elegant oolong tea and velvety sweet caramel.

Passionate about coffee and eager to learn more, founder Joseph Brodsky moved to southern Ethiopia in 2006 to explore coffee alongside local producers. Here, he began classifying the varieties and terroir that produced the best coffee, establishing controls on post-harvest protocols, and developing innovative processing methods to achieve unique flavour profiles. From Ethiopia, he set his sights on Panama and the potential of the terroir around the Barú volcano. With its unique combination of ocean breezes, mountainous terrain, abundant rainfall, and nutrient-dense soil, Joseph found that the mountains of Panama represent some of the best coffee-growing terroir in the world.

Here, he found an estate which remained wild and in places unforgiving, with steep slopes, abundant wildlife, and turbulent waterfalls. In other places, however, it had been nearly destroyed. A former cattle ranch, hundreds of acres had been clear-cut to create grazing lands. Guided by a passion for ecological regeneration, the Ninety Plus team spent years reforesting the land with native trees before planting shade-loving Ethiopian coffee trees beneath the forest canopy, spacing them far apart to reduce nutrient competition and to leave room for other forest species to thrive.

The best coffee in the world can only be made by cultivating a deep understanding of nature. It is through this relationship that Ninety Plus can hand-select the most prized Gesha and other Ethiopian heirloom coffee varietals and match them to boundary-pushing processing techniques.

The processing for this lot follows the method used for the famous Lot #227, with a multi-stage, proprietary technique which magnifies the quality of the coffee cherry.