Ninety Plus
In this interview with Joseph Brodsky, the founder of Ninety Plus, we asked him about his passion for coffee making and how to enjoy very specialized coffees.
When was Ninety Plus established?
We founded Ninety Plus in the Fall of 2006. Before that, I had a coffee roasting company called “Novo Coffee” that I ran with my father and my brother.
We founded Ninety Plus in the Fall of 2006. Before that, I had a coffee roasting company called “Novo Coffee” that I ran with my father and my brother.
Yes. I was roasting and selling Ethiopian coffee at Novo Coffee for 6 years. And since 2005, I’ve traveled to Ethiopia several times to directly work with farmers to purchase their beans locally.
What was your first impression when you first visited Ethiopia?
It was like a coffee paradise. Ethiopia's history and culture of coffee is very old and coffee is deeply rooted in their daily lives. Ethiopia drinks 50% of the coffee that it produces. As a country, it‘s not only a large-scale producer, but also a big consumer of its own coffee. I would consider it to be the single-most strongly-connected country in the world to coffee. There are almost 100 tribes in Ethiopia and each tribe has its own coffee culture. Surrounded by such a ubiquitous and unique coffee culture, I was attracted to 10,000 different genetic varieties of coffee growing there.
When I started Ninety Plus as my own business, I stayed in Ethiopia for a long time, from August of 2006 to April of 2007. I wanted to be a coffee producer, not just a coffee roaster, so I tried to learn as much as I could about Ethiopia and its 10,000 different genetic varieties of coffee. I partnered with the farmers in Ethiopia and learned all I could about their coffee. The coffee farmers that I have a partnership with are a very responsible and wonderful family. I was very lucky to be able to connect with such a trustworthy partner, and through them, also get to know many other coffee farmers.
Ethiopia has a very strong coffee culture, but the coffee they export is very cheap, basically a commodity, so their industrial processes are tooled for high-volume production and export, which has led to people engaged in coffee production suffering from low wages and unpleasant working conditions. My vision was to specialize in a way that had not been done before, to create the finest coffees in the world using small-scale, highly-specialized processes, and I hoped that would change the existing marketing model of the coffee industry.
It has become customary for a single coffee mill to use coffee from thousands of farmers that produce many different varieties of bean, and pay those producers a standard market price. I wanted to take a new approach. I paid above market price for very specialized local farmers to bring me a single variety of coffee bean. I carefully select only the best beans and extract maximum value from them. That was the origin of Ninety Plus.
The Ethiopian coffee workers are very friendly and work very hard. However, I experienced a lot of logistical challenges. Ethiopia has farms that are very far away from each other, so moving between those places by car took a lot of time. It was also very difficult for me as a foreigner to get a permit to take coffee out of the country. I was very stressed because I was making beautiful coffees but couldn't export them to market.
But I spent many years trying to solve those logistical problems. For the first six years in business, I spent a majority of my time in Ethiopia and worked on delivering beans, filing paperwork for export permits, and checking in on the progress of the production and logistics processes. In the end, I did the final tasting and qualification of the coffees by myself. After that I traveled the world with samples and offered tasting experiences of Ninety Plus coffees. Specialty coffee was very new for the market and I was very lucky that people really loved the coffee. I offered a few varieties of single-source coffees from different areas in Ethiopia so they could taste the difference. Those tasting experiences helped excite people’s interest in our coffee.
But I spent many years trying to solve those logistical problems. For the first six years in business, I spent a majority of my time in Ethiopia and worked on delivering beans, filing paperwork for export permits, and checking in on the progress of the production and logistics processes. In the end, I did the final tasting and qualification of the coffees by myself. After that I traveled the world with samples and offered tasting experiences of Ninety Plus coffees. Specialty coffee was very new for the market and I was very lucky that people really loved the coffee. I offered a few varieties of single-source coffees from different areas in Ethiopia so they could taste the difference. Those tasting experiences helped excite people’s interest in our coffee.
Definitely. After I brought our coffees to Nordic countries for the first time, Norway, Denmark and Sweden decided to use our coffees in their Barista Competitions. People were surprised to know that our coffee, which is single origin, had a very fruity taste, and was produced using only natural farming methods, and the decision was made to use it in competitions. Our coffee was also very controversial because we created new unique flavors by applying our original fermentation processes. This got everyone interested and talking about our coffee after each competition was finished.
Since then, little by little, coffee lovers have started to talk about Ninety Plus, and have written about me in countries that I’ve never been to. In the early days, I couldn’t travel much because I was too busy worrying about logistics and finances. But I am now finally starting to visit the countries where Ninety Plus has gained new popularity. Social media was not so big when I started the company, so it wasn’t until I actually visited these new countries that I knew how much they loved our coffee.
What I want to specialize in is not only making coffee farming better, but making the coffee industry as a whole “a little bit better”. It’s not just the processing or selectivity, but also the hospitality, design, and experience of the coffee estate where people can see and taste the process of coffee making.
Consideration for the ecology of coffee making is also very important for me. We have farms in forests and our coffee trees coexist with other trees. Bigger trees play an important role as a sun umbrella for our shade loving coffee trees. In many places tropical forests are being lost in order to make big coffee plantations, but I want to contribute to reforestation by growing coffee trees in a natural way.
It is quite natural that producers try to make better tasting coffee, but I want to go beyond that by spreading our farming methods and values so that everybody involved can be happy; the workers, the visitors and the trees as well. This vision is a part of our core identity.
The first thing that differentiates us from others is that I've invested many years in the production of specialty coffee and currently own three big farms. The farms in Panama measure almost 1000 hectares where specialized Ethiopian heirloom coffee trees are maturing and growing in a forest environment. I don’t think anyone in the world has as many trees grown naturally as I do at this stage. It takes many years to create this level of coffee farming.
Our second strength would be the processing of the beans, especially the fermentation process. During these 15 years since I started Ninety Plus, I've continued working on various fermentation formulas. This accumulated knowledge and the skills we’ve honed have enabled us to create different tastes from a single kind of coffee bean. This has added higher value to our products and caught the attention of many people.
Our high-quality coffee cherries have a very special flavor even before we make coffee from them. We take the raw beans and infuse them with special flavors through fermentation. The variations in flavor expand depending upon the fermentation formula. It’s the same as wine-making. You start with the same grape, but you can make it taste different depending on whether you use only the juice or include the skin, or adjust the amount of oxygen and water, temperature and so on. There are many variables in coffee fermentation as well, and we've worked on it for so many years that we can now reliably create a wide variety of different tastes. We are still continuing to discover new flavors through constant experimentation. There will be more and more new products being created and introduced to the market.
To sum up the story so far, Ninety Plus grows coffee in very special locations, puts extraordinary effort into establishing a production system that is happy for everyone involved, and creates a variety of tastes with their original fermentation formulas. Their farms are forests, with waterfalls, trails and many wild animals. You are welcome to visit their wonderful farms that are rich with nature, and you can enjoy tasting the best coffee flavors extracted through different fermentation styles.
