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. Founder Joseph Brodsky had an opportunity in 2009 to acquire this large property (~200 hectares) and had a vision of reforesting its historic cattle farming lands with native tree species while planting the shade-loving Ethiopian Gesha coffee beneath the canopy.
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. 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.
Drima Zede was developed by Ninety Plus in Ethiopia in a successful effort to improve the flavor of common coffee varieties through deepe fermentation. Their heaviest processing formula is now applied to mixed heirlooms grown in Panama.
