Ninety Plus
Ninety Plus is a coffee grower and producer — not a roaster — that operates in Panama and Ethiopia and sells finished green coffee under its own brand.1 It was founded by Joseph Brodsky, who is named as founder and CEO in trade reporting and appears on the company’s own site as the person who bought its Panamanian land.23
Two things make it unusual enough to be worth a note.
It sells its own coffee, on its own terms. Almost every famous Panamanian Geisha reaches buyers through the Best of Panama auction, where a public hammer price becomes the headline. Ninety Plus does not enter that auction — it sells direct, in named lots, at prices it sets itself. That is why a Ninety Plus coffee can win a world championship and still have no auction price attached to it anywhere (see Tetsu Kasuya, who won the 2016 World Brewers Cup with one).
It treats a coffee lot the way a winery treats a cuvée. Rather than selling “washed Geisha, Volcán, 1,700 m”, the company sells individually named coffees. Its own storefront lists Juliette, Tigre, Perci, Lycello, Sillvia, Ruby, Carmo, Yuzo, Nekisse, Kemgin and Drima Zede, at package prices running from about US45 to US230.2 The same naming habit shows up at Finca Deborah and is described more generally on Enigma.
The Panama estates
The company’s Panamanian operation sits on the slopes of Volcán Barú, the inactive volcano in Chiriquí province that produces essentially every Panamanian record coffee. There are two properties, both described on the company’s own site:2
| Estate | Size | Acquired | What the company says about it | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gesha Estates | 200 hectares | 2009 | Reforested former cattle land; up to three metres of rainfall a year |
| 2 | Barú Estates | 270 hectares | 2019 | A drier site worked with “ancient, low density land use methods” |
The Gesha Estates model is agroforestry — you replant the forest first, then put coffee underneath it. The company describes “shade-loving Ethiopian geisha coffee plants” and “Ethiopian heirloom coffee gardens” growing in that rebuilt canopy,2 and on social media describes itself as reforesting tropical land and planting coffee “in the understory”.4 Cattle pasture reverting to coffee forest is the same story as Los Lajones and Finca Sophia — buying degraded highland cheaply and rebuilding it.
The 470-hectare combined footprint is very large by Panamanian standards. For comparison, the estates that dominate Best of Panama — Carmen Estate, Finca Deborah — count their Geisha in tens of hectares, not hundreds.
The Ethiopian side
Ninety Plus began in Ethiopia, and the Ethiopian work is where the brand’s reputation was built. In 2016 it was running Ninety Plus Magokoro Estates near Shakiso, in the Guji zone of Oromia, at roughly 1,800 metres, fully organic.3 Magokoro is Japanese for “devotion”.3
Shakiso is one of Guji’s recognised specialty sub-regions, so the location is coherent rather than exotic — this is the same corner of Ethiopia that produces the naturals now sold worldwide under the Guji name.
Several of the lot names still on sale — Nekisse, Kemgin, Drima Zede — are Ethiopian-origin names, which is the clearest surviving thread between the two halves of the company.
Makers and superpickers
The most distinctive thing Ninety Plus has done is a programme that hands the processing decisions to competition baristas.
Under Maker Series 3, each “Maker” is paired with a team of Ninety Plus superpickers — pickers selected for speed and selectivity, since a picker who strips a branch of unripe cherry destroys the lot — and together they harvest and process experimental batches that then carry the Maker’s name.3
The seven Makers named in 2016, with the credentials they held at the time:3
| Maker | Credential | Lot |
|---|---|---|
| Stefanos Domatiotis | 2014 World Brewers Cup champion | Perci |
| Odd-Steinar Tøllefsen | 2015 World Brewers Cup champion | Nekisse |
| Yoshikazu Iwase | 2014 & 2015 Japan Barista Champion | Silvia |
| George Koustoumpardis | 2015 World Coffee in Good Spirits champion | Kemgin |
| Jeremy Zhang | 2014 China Barista Champion | Juliette |
| Hanna Teramoto | 2014 New Zealand Barista Champion | Hachira |
| Chad Wang | 2016 Taiwan Brewers Cup champion | Lotus |
Four of those credentials can be checked against this wiki’s own championship tables and all four hold: Domatiotis won the World Brewers Cup in 2014 in Rimini, Tøllefsen in 2015 in Gothenburg, Koustoumpardis won Coffee in Good Spirits in 2015 in Gothenburg, and Chad Wang went on to take the 2017 world Brewers Cup title in Budapest after his Taiwanese one. That is independent corroboration of the roster, and it explains the commercial logic: the people most likely to buy a $200 bag of coffee are the people who follow the person whose name is on it.
Note what this programme is and is not. Being a Maker means a lot was named after a champion, processed with them, after they won. It is not evidence that any of them competed with Ninety Plus coffee.
The championship connection that is documented
One is: Tetsu Kasuya won the 2016 World Brewers Cup in Dublin with a natural Geisha from Panama grown by Ninety Plus, a lot recorded on this wiki as “Sylvia”. He said he chose it partly for the producer’s approach rather than for cup score alone.
That lot name is almost certainly the same coffee as the Sillvia on the company’s current storefront and the Silvia of the Maker table — three spellings of one name — but see the flag below.
How to place it
Ninety Plus sits at the far end of a spectrum this wiki keeps running into. At one end is a producer who grows a coffee and sends it to a public auction, where a buyer’s bid sets the value — Carmen Estate’s $10,005/kg at Best of Panama. At the other is a producer who controls the variety, the picking, the fermentation, the name, the packaging and the retail price, and never lets a third party price the coffee at all.
Ninety Plus is the second kind, and it got there early. The trade-off is exactly the one visible in this note: total control of the story, and almost no independently verifiable numbers. Compare Alo Coffee, which runs its own Echoes of the Peak auction — private, but with published hammer prices — and Daye Bensa, which competes through the national Cup of Excellence and therefore has an official results row for everything it does.
To verify
What the name means. “Ninety Plus” is universally read in the trade as a reference to coffees scoring 90 or more points on the 100-point SCA cupping scale. That reading is entirely plausible and may well be right, but no statement from the company defining its own name was found on any page consulted here, including its own site.2 Treat it as industry interpretation, not company doctrine.
Sylvia / Silvia / Sillvia. The lot Tetsu Kasuya won with is recorded on this wiki as “Sylvia”; Perfect Daily Grind gives the Maker lot as “Silvia”;3 the company’s own storefront currently reads “Sillvia”.2 These are near-certainly one coffee, but no source consulted spells it consistently, and none ties Kasuya’s specific 2016 competition lot to the Maker Series lot of the same name. Do not treat the identification as documented.
Whether the Ethiopian operation is still running. The Magokoro estate near Shakiso is sourced to a 2016 article.3 A LinkedIn company listing still describes production in “Panama and Ethiopia”,1 but the company’s current homepage is written almost entirely around Panama, and where it says “Ethiopian” it means Ethiopian-origin plants grown in Panama, not Ethiopian farms.2 No source consulted states whether Ninety Plus still produces in Ethiopia, or when Magokoro ceased if it did.
The Panama address and legal form. The estate address Silla de Pando, Volcán, Chiriquí comes from the company’s LinkedIn listing alone.1 No corporate registry document was consulted, so the legal entity, corporate form and ownership structure are unknown — do not state them.
Altitudes, processing labels, scores and prices. No elevation figure for Gesha Estates or Barú Estates is published on any page consulted; the company mentions cold fermentation and cold-water processing for the Yuzo and Sillvia coffees2 but publishes no per-lot processing sheet. No cupping score for any Ninety Plus lot, and no per-pound or per-kilo price, was found in any source. The only price data here is the
45–230 per package retail range on the company’s own storefront,2 where package size is not stated — so it cannot be converted to a price per pound and must not be compared with Best of Panama auction figures.Founding date. No source consulted gives a founding year for the company. 2009 is the year Brodsky acquired the Panamanian property,2 which post-dates the Ethiopian work — so it is the estate’s date, not the company’s, and should not be used as one.
Related
- Tetsu Kasuya — won the 2016 World Brewers Cup with a Ninety Plus natural Geisha
- Geisha — the variety the Panama estates are built on
- Panama · Ethiopia — its two origins
- Guji — the Ethiopian zone containing Shakiso, where its Magokoro estate sat
- Gori Gesha forest · Gesha Village Coffee Estate — where the Geisha plant actually comes from
- Best of Panama — the auction it conspicuously does not enter
- Alo Coffee · Echoes of the Peak — the other producer that sells outside the national competition system
- Daye Bensa — the opposite route: competing through official channels
- Finca Deborah · Carmen Estate · Finca Sophia — the Volcán neighbours
- Natural process · Coffee fermentation — the processing families its reputation rests on
- Enigma — on the practice of giving individual lots proper names
- Green coffee auctions · Premiumisation — the market it opted out of, and the one it helped create
Official links
Footnotes
-
Ninety Plus Coffee — official site — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the Gesha Estates and Barú Estates sizes and acquisition dates, the reforestation and rainfall description, the named-lot list and the
45–230 package price range ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 -
Perfect Daily Grind — Makers and Superpickers: Experimental Ninety Plus Coffee in Ethiopia — confirmed via WebFetch; source of Joseph Brodsky as founder and CEO, the Magokoro estate near Shakiso at ~1,800 m, and the Maker Series 3 roster ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7