Nekisse – formerly Beloya – was the first coffee Ninety Plus developed in Ethiopia, and in 2007, it was the first coffee to score 97 points on Coffee Review.
Ninety Plus Founder, Joseph Brodsky, moved to Ethiopia in 2006 to start Ninety Plus. He lived full-time in Ethiopia for 2 years, fermenting and drying coffees with his own hands and intuition. These tiny batches (the Aricha and Beloya Micro Selections) were first taken on a tour to specialty roasters in the Nordic countries who hadn’t tasted natural processed coffees of this level prior. They quickly became the choice of national barista champions who featured them on the World Barista Competition stage in Copenhagen in 2008. These coffees were the first single-origin, natural process coffees to be presented in the World Barista Championships and were the precursors of the current Panama Nekisse.