We consider a lifting of Joseph ideals for the minimal nilpotent orbit closure to the setting of affine Kac–Moody algebras and find new examples of affine vertex algebras whose associated varieties are minimal nilpotent orbit closures. As an application we obtain a new family of lisse ($C_{2}$-cofinite) $W$-algebras that are not coming from admissible representations of affine Kac–Moody algebras.