HAYB Coffee Roastery from Warsaw in Poland

We are excited to be featuring for the first time in the Bean Bros Coffee subscription HAYB coffee roastery based in Poland. Find our introduction of the roasters here, and the featured coffees in November 2022.

HAYB is a family business of Wiktor Borowski and his dad Robert Borowski. The roaster in its current form was established in 2016 at Aleje Jerozolimskie 200 in Warsaw. The oldest coffee heads probably remember that for the first 2 years we were known as the Coffee Republic. 

We were motivated to change by the actions of a local English company of the same name, which actively claimed the rights to our brand. We lost our Facebook page and there was no way to get it back. It was a difficult topic for us then. Of course, we wondered how our customers would react and how this situation would affect our business. The change was also associated with high costs and a huge amount of work, but we decided to think only a little bit and started working on the new brand as soon as possible. This is how the name HAYB was born, which is short for How Are You Brewing. Already in 2018, we became a coffee sponsor for the Brewers Cup, and from that moment, we built our history anew. 

We learned an important lesson from this whole process: in business, there are often situations that seem hopeless, but with the right approach, hard work and a bit of luck, you can turn them into success.

Above all, we want to enjoy what we do, so we try to do things our way. People who love what they do and are strongly involved in the daily decisions and life of the roastery are significant to us. The strength of the company is primarily an experienced and well-coordinated team. We are so lucky that over the years, we have created a good environment for development for experienced coffee drinkers and people who are just starting their adventure with coffee.

Of course, the quality of our products is written in our DNA. We attach great importance to the green raw material's origin and freshness and proper firing. To achieve all this, we are constantly training. Most of the team regularly participates in certified SCA trainings by Coffee Support. In addition, both Wiktor Borowski, the owner and our head roaster Dawid Zadara are certified Q-Graders.

We have a very strong quality control team, which, apart from us, is also created by our export manager Nick and second roaster and production manager Marek Witak. Solid knowledge and experience allow us to conduct crazy and often controversial experiments, such as ageing coffee in different barrels. We were the first roastery in Poland to start roasting such coffees on a larger scale. We have already released at least a dozen editions, which always sell out literally on the spot.

Sustainability is an important topic, and we are working hard on concrete actions to change for the better.

Currently, the most important thing for us is purchasing new roasting equipment and adapting our roasting room to increase production capacity. This is necessary to achieve our long-term goal of conquering foreign markets. There are far too few Polish roasters on the European and global markets. We're going to change that.

We import our beans from small boutique importers and larger players who offer a wide range of beans from around the world. All our coffees from Rwanda - even the one you will find in Sie Przelewa Owoc - are imported with the help of Michał from 1000Hills. Through his long-term activity on the market, he has established lasting relationships with Rushashi and Muhondo farms. We have a similar relationship with Alexandre at Unroasted, which imports coffee from Brazil. With the help of both gentlemen, we maintain many years of cooperation with individual farms that we value very much. Another exceptional supplier we must mention is 88Graines, run by Agata, Jola and Piotrek. They provide us with coffee from Central America.

This year, our roaster Dawid organized a trip there and, together with Jola from 88Graines, visited several producers whose coffees we have in our offer. We also use larger importers operating on a European or even global scale, such as Ally Coffee, Falcon Coffees or Touton. 

We are constantly looking for new directions, but the core of our offer is coffee from South America, Central America and Africa. All coffees from our Espresso and Sie Przelewa offer are based on classics from these regions of the world. At the same time, the Specialty Single Origin series features beans from Asia more and more often. We are a big fan of coffee from Indonesia, and recently, we also had great coffee from India in offer. More and more coffees from this continent will appear in the roastery's offer. We've already had great coffees from Laos and China - it's only a matter of time before they will be available on a broader scale!

Through our activities, we try to have a tangible impact on the reality that surrounds us, which is why we often cooperate with public benefit organizations and animal shelters from which we allocate part of the income to support them. We also like to enter into cooperation with brands whose activities we value very much, and with craft breweries, successfully combining the world of coffee with the world of beer in cooperation, e.g. with the Artezan brewery, Funky Fluid, Maltgarden and Magic Road. The collaboration, as mentioned earlier and projects are coordinated by our head of marketing, Mateusz Tryjanowski, and his team for special tasks. His superhuman effort makes everything go forward, and no one has suffered from our crazy ideas yet. We love contact with people, which is why you can meet us at virtually every festival in Poland and more and more often abroad. We run our own HAYB academy, where we train amateurs and more experienced baristas.

Great selection for this month, for each of the coffee being featured please could you share some detail

1) Colombia La Loma (SIE PRZELEWA Tropik)

Sensory profile: Tropical explosion, a bowl of ripe fruit with a drop of rum, doused with caramel, with a chewy finish.
ORIGIN: Colombia
REGION: Antioquia
ALTITUDE: 1950 m a.s.l.
BOTANICAL VARIETY: Castillo
PROCESSING: Washed
Q SCORE: 88

Colombia La Loma aka SIĘ PRZELEWA Tropik is a part of our SIE PRZELEWA series of coffee and it is also the newest addition to the series. 

Finca La Loma is owned by fifth-generation coffee producer Juan Carlos Guerra along with his father, Eduardo Guerra. The farm is located in the Ciudad Bolívar municipality of Antioquia, right next to the Farallones del Citará forest reserve. Ripe cherries of this coffee are manually harvested before being floated, sorted, and pulped. The pulped coffee is then fermented in plastic tanks with eucalyptus leaves for 96 hours. The fermented coffee is then washed and dried on sun-exposed raised beds for 20 days. Its superpowers are mild taste and low acidity. It works with everything: put it in your coffee machine – no matter if it's Melitta or Moccamasster – shoot yourself Chemex, Aeropress, V60, French press or whatever you have there. It will be delicious!

2) Ethiopia Duromina

Sensory profile: Lemon Earl Grey, Apple, Honey
ORIGIN: Ethiopia
REGION: Jimma, Oromia, Western Ethiopia
ALTITUDE: 1900 m a.s.l.
BOTANICAL VARIETY: Heirloom
PROCESSING: Washed
Q SCORE: 88.5

It sparkles in front of you, and its name speaks for itself. It says an essential thing because Duromina in Afan Ormo means "improve life, enrich it" and it happened here. Farmers in this region had everything that should bear fruit of the highest quality – very high altitude, fertile and mineral-rich soils, extremely complex varieties of coffee trees and an ideal amount of rainfall.

In 2010, one hundred local growers joined forces as part of a cooperative they named Duromina because they simply wanted to change their lives for the better. The missing link was quality control. Thanks to technical support, business consulting and access to finance (as part of the TechnoServe Coffee Initiative), farmers acquired and installed the so-called wet mill, which for the first time allowed them to process washed.

Now, cooperative farmers produce coffees of exceptional quality, achieving results even at the level of 90+. These improvements helped Duromin to produce high-quality coffee and provide the community with much better living conditions. Two years later, an international panel of professional judges chose their coffee as the best in Africa, awarding the cooperative the main prize – a cool story, a beautiful final, an even more beautiful coffee.

3) Guatemala Huehuetenango

Sensory profile: Red Fruit, Milk Chocolate, Cane Sugar
ORIGIN: Guatemala
REGION: La Libertad, HuehuetenangoALTITUDE: 1800 m a.s.l.
BOTANICAL VARIETY: Caturra, Bourbon
PROCESSING: Washed
Q SCORE: 87,5

Probably the funniest coffee there is hue hue. Being beyond the complex, Guatemala Huehuetenango ain't no joke! 

Huehuetenango is a province northwest of Guatemala, known for its agricultural coffee area approximately 265 km from the capital. Filled with breathtaking views, height and climate, it is an ideal place for growing a coffee tree. You will feel its roots in this coffee!

Guatemalan beans are a great alternative to classic Brazilians for those looking to change from chocolate-nut notes to fruity accents with a scoop of sweet vanilla with low acidity. An espresso shot made of these beans is perhaps not rushing metal, but it is easy to say that it is a classic of good rock – a lot is going on, only known hits, without a trace of boredom!

Any closing remark you would like to make to our subscribers...a message of hope, joy, humour...or even how you want them to remember HAYB

Drink good coffee and do it effortlessly :)