Specialty coffee in Poland.

Ask an older Pole how they drink coffee and the answer is a glass: fine grounds, boiling water, wait for it to settle. Parzucha, or kawa po turecku. The chains brought lattes in the nineties, a Warsaw café started roasting on an old Probat in 1999, and from there Poland built a serious specialty scene in about twenty years.

The moment the world noticed was 2018, when Agnieszka Rojewska won the World Barista Championship in Amsterdam, the first Polish winner and the first woman to take the title. She added the coffee-cocktail world title in 2022. Three years earlier, a Norwegian roaster who had just set up shop in Bydgoszcz had won the world roasting title, and Polish roasters have been chasing that light, clean, Nordic style ever since.

The Polish version has habits of its own: roasters that name their coffees like records (Bass Brew, Funky Bean), a filter line called Się Przelewa that got a whole country brewing pour-over, a dark specialty roast made specifically for the old glass-and-boiling-water method, and a parcel-locker network that puts a bag of Kenya on your doorstep the day after you order it.

Warsaw has the establishment. Java has roasted since 2001, supplies cafés and offices across the country and runs its own training school. HAYB (How Are You Brewing) made pour-over a national habit with its Się Przelewa filter range. Coffee Plant names its coffees by flavour (Very Berry, Chocolate Bomb) and sells everywhere. 3P roasts a deep list from its café, and Story and Heresy fill out the newer wave.

The rest of the map is not far behind. Hard Beans in Opole roasts, ferments, publishes its findings and builds cold-brew machines. Audun Coffee in Bydgoszcz roasts Nordic-light, with a world roasting title behind it. Kraków has BeMyBean, Coffee Proficiency, Dobra Palarnia and Krakowska Palarnia. On the coast, Gdańska Palarnia Kawy runs a long, changing catalog. Podkawa roasts in Łódź, Kafar in Gliwice, and Kahawa in Poznań sells coffee next to books.

Agnieszka Rojewska, from Poznań, is the World Barista Champion of 2018 and the World Coffee in Good Spirits Champion of 2022, with three Polish barista titles and four latte-art titles besides. Audun Sørbotten won the world roasting title in 2015 from his roastery in Bydgoszcz. Krzysztof Barabosz of Hard Beans leads the research behind Hardtank and used to run events for the national coffee association. Nicholas Fitzwilliams and Glen Gregory built Java from a café on Pańska Street, and Rafał Kaniewski, Java's head roaster, took the Polish roasting title in 2018 and finished in the world top ten the year after.

Warsaw and Kraków carry the most roasters, but Poland's scene is spread across a dozen cities, and two of its most influential roasteries sit in towns most visitors never reach.

Espresso and milk drinks keep the cafés busy, but Poland took to filter at home faster than most: V60, AeroPress and automatic drip machines, helped along by HAYB's Się Przelewa line of light-roasted beans made for exactly that. On the shelf, Brazil, Colombia and Ethiopia anchor most catalogs: Brazil under the espresso blends, Ethiopia and Kenya on the filter shelf, Colombia across both, with Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras and Rwanda in the seasonal rotation. Kenya has a particular following here; washed Kiis and Ruarais turn up at roaster after roaster.

Filter roasts lean Nordic-light; espresso roasts stay medium and sweet, because that is what the cafés sell. Washed and natural lots carry most of the volume, honeys fill in from Central America, and the experimental end (anaerobic, thermal-shock, even koji-fermented lots at Hard Beans) gets the attention on Instagram. After washed, the shelves lean on natural (×243) and honey (×36). Decaf has gone from missing to standard, sugarcane and Swiss Water, with 46 decaf coffees listed right now. 312 of the current listings are roasted for filter or for both methods.

Polish roasters price in złoty; the figures here are converted to euros so you can compare across the directory. They come from every Polish coffee currently listed with a price, not a sample we chose. The going rate today is €39 per kilogram, against €47 across every roaster in the directory.

The ladder reads like this: espresso blends and everyday filter lines at the everyday end around €32 per kilogram, washed East Africans and Central American lots from about €50 per kilogram, and the rarest bag currently listed at €254 per kilogram. 1,158 coffees carry a price today. Buying is easy: every roaster runs a webshop, subscriptions are standard, and the InPost parcel lockers on every corner mean a bag ordered today is usually in your hands tomorrow.