Notes From Our Importer:
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
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.
Kambera derives its name from “Kampi” (site of Kampi Cooperative, a visit to which inspired – along with a hike to Ethiopia’s wildest coffee forests on the same trip – the coffee reforestation model currently employed at Ninety Plus) and “berry”. Kambera is now cultivated at Ninety Plus Gesha Estates in Panama, a proof of concept of the model inspired by Joseph’s very first visits to Ethiopian coffee communities and coffee wilderness.
Notes From Our Owner:
PRESS is excited to announce our Fall Allocation, an extended fermentation gesha coffee from Panama called Kambera. With Kambera, we’re most excited about its cleanliness and complexity. A lot of extended fermentation coffees are interesting, but often one-noted and muddled. Kambara is on a different level; it is extremely clean, complex, and carries a velvety body. Notes of blackberry juice, cherry, bergamot, and cognac jump out of the cup in harmony. There isn’t a sip of this cup that leaves us wondering what more it could have to offer.
We’ve brought this coffee in through Ninety Plus, a coffee producer which has been transforming the coffee farming and marketing model since 2006. Ninety Plus specializes in bringing Ethiopian heirloom coffees to Panama and impeccably growing, processing and exporting some of the words best coffees with complete control of the process.
We brewed the coffee with the Kalita wave, with 30 grams of dry coffee yielding 490 garms of brewed coffee. The brew time was 3:30. Hot, the coffee carried notes of red wine. As the coffee cooled it opened up and had very strong blackberry and cherry notes, becoming sweeter and more complex at the same time. The body was velvety and big from start to finish with a pleasant acidity all the way through.
