Are International Coffee Beans Always Expensive? Get to Know the Affordable 90+ Coffee Bean - Chelchele

Coffee is a craft best learned by tasting widely and comparing notes with other drinkers.

Ethiopia's Many Ways of Growing Coffee

Ethiopia holds just about every kind of coffee cultivation at once: vast wild coffee forests and semi-developed land, traditionally managed small plots, and modern plantations. Roughly 50% of the crop is grown above 1500 meters.

Those four production settings give Ethiopia nine major coffee regions. Five are specialty areas - Sidamo, Yirgacheffe, Harar, Limu, and Lekempti - and four produce mainly commercial beans: Djimah, Illubabor, Tepi, and Bebeka. Each region works with natural or washed processing, and the method shapes the flavor. Today natural processing accounts for about 80% of the crop and washed for about 20%.

Ninety Plus: A Supplier Apart

Ninety Plus Coffee is a specialty supplier from the United States, founded in 2006. In the decade since, it has convinced coffee professionals worldwide of its singular appeal and set off an unprecedented wave of enthusiasm for specialty coffee. From its first coffee in 2007, it has remained the precious first choice for industry experts and competition participants. Today Ninety Plus is shorthand for world-class specialty coffee, with taste and quality far beyond other precious coffees.

An Unusual Naming Philosophy

90+ beans are named in a completely different way from conventional specialty coffee: no region, no estate name. Each bean is named for its flavor profile instead. "Chù Máng," for example, means "best approach" in the local dialect. To start from a flavor idea, then name it, then choose the region and partner farms - that tells you 90+ is a brand with a boutique mindset.

What "90+" Actually Means

"Ninety Plus" does not mean every coffee that scores above 90 points. Good coffee varies year to year, sometimes available and sometimes not; sometimes it appears at different estates and carries different flavor characteristics. "Ninety Plus" refers to a series of 13 premium coffee varieties. These coffees come only from Ninety Plus Coffee, the American specialty coffee creator. All are Ethiopian heirloom varieties, grown in ecological settings, processed to artistic standards, and optimized for flavor.

Processing as Craft

Processing is where Ninety Plus excels. The company separates its coffees by variety, microclimate, and harvest timing, tastes each one individually, and designs a specific process for each flavor to reach a target profile - much like the product development of a major brand, researched and refined by hand until it is closer to craft than manufacturing. Natural products pass through countless refinements before they reach you in their best form.

A Change in Structure

LEVEL UP will no longer operate as a sub-brand of Ninety Plus; it becomes one of the company's product lines, and the original independent design is dropped.

New-season products may retire the original L grading system (previously L7, L12, L39, L139), and products and lines will instead be divided by more meaningful taste differences. The lines fall into four series: NinetyPlus Ethiopia, NinetyPlus Panama, Ninety Levelup, and NinetyPlus Limited.

Ninety Plus Chù Máng (Candle Light)

Origin of the name: Drima Zede (Chù Máng) means "Best Approach" in the local dialect. According to the producer, this Yirgacheffe is a specialized series developed on the back of 90+ years of experience.

The ancient natural method makes pure flavors hard to obtain, but Drima Zede, with 90+ technical support, hand-selects only the ripest cherries. Drying requires constant, careful turning for evenness. The result is a very transparent, pure cup that shifts noticeably from hot to cold, with captivating fruit, floral, and oak-barrel aromas.

Among Ethiopian natural beans, Chù Máng has been strictly supervised and sorted, avoiding the earthy off-notes and high defect rates that plague ordinary naturals while playing up the sweetness the method is famous for.

Chù Máng's alluring fruit tone carries the aroma that traditional Ethiopian natural processing bestows, expressing a round, full sweetness with a long aftertaste and just the right amount of mouth-watering fruit acidity. It is also easy to brew day to day: the bean is rich in flavor, and whether you use a fresh drip filter or a rich siphon, it shows its inherent character.

Siphoning Chù Máng

25g of coffee, 310g of water, medium grind, fine sugar; water at 90-91°C. Lower the heat, add the coffee and stir 3-5 times to wet it fully; at 45 seconds stir gently again for 5 seconds; turn off the heat and stir once more while rotating. Fresh citrus aroma, rich body, prominent sweetness in the finish, excellent aftertaste.

90+ Chù Máng flavor profile: Nectarine, tropical fruit, clean and bright, astonishing from the first sip.

90+ Coffee Bean Brand Recommendation

FrontStreet Coffee's roasted 90+ Chù Máng backs up its brand and its quality, and it offers extremely high value besides - a half-pound (227g) package costs only about 90 yuan. At 15g a cup, that is 15 cups per package, roughly 6 yuan each. Next to coffee shops charging hundreds of yuan a cup, that is a genuinely honest recommendation.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

The Chù Máng story is really a Yirgacheffe story, and FrontStreet Coffee's own Yirgacheffe line is the simplest way to keep exploring it. Start with the washed Yirgacheffe that many drinkers meet as their very first specialty coffee: white jasmine on the nose, bright citrus and lemon acidity, a clean tea-like body, and a price that makes it a genuine everyday bean.

For a natural-processed counterpoint, the Yirgacheffe Natural Red Cherry is a good next step. Only fully ripe, all-red cherries are used; they dry in the sun for three to five weeks and are turned every two to three hours in the first few days so the fruit does not over-ferment. Expect citrus-like acidity, berry juice, honeyed sweetness, and a creamy smoothness. Brew it on a V60 at 90-91°C with 15g of coffee and a 1:15 ratio, ground to a fine-sugar size: bloom for 30 seconds with 30g of water, pour to about 225g in total, and finish in roughly 2:00 to 2:10.

If you want the cooperative character of Yirgacheffe's southeastern edge, the Gotiti cooperative lot is worth seeking out. It sits in the Woka area, once part of the Woka cooperative under the YCFCU, and it is a washed coffee with clean, bright citrus and lemon acidity and jasmine florals - never bitter in the traditional sense.