JAVA Coffee Roasters was founded in Warsaw in 2001. In 1999 Stoney Point Java opened a chain of cafés in the city and roasted on a 5 kg Probat from the 1970s. After Glen Gregory became managing director in 2004, the company closed the cafés to concentrate on roasting and on supplying hotels, restaurants and cafés as JAVA Coffee. A trip to Glasgow in 2005 started its work with specialty coffee, and in 2009 it joined the Cup of Excellence programme, the year Gregory became a Cup of Excellence judge.

It roasts on a 35 kg Loring Kestrel, installed in 2013, and a Diedrich CR-25, added in 2018, with Cropster software, sample roasts on an IKAWA and blind cupping of every batch. It has never roasted robusta. Its head roaster won the Polish roasting championship in 2018 and came eighth at the World Coffee Roasting Championship in Rimini in 2019. Training runs through the JAVA University, founded in 2009, and the motto is “Good coffee is a human right”.

JAVA CAFE opened in 2013 as a five-square-metre pop-up with a desk made of pallets at the BioBazar organic market. It is now a 50-square-metre café at the entrance to the BioBazar in the Norblin Factory, selling the roastery’s beans alongside SUKI teas, brewing kit and the plant milks JAVA distributes in Poland, from Sproud, Minor Figures and Rude Health. Plant milk comes at no extra charge, the menu changes for summer and winter, and the counter has pastries and sandwiches.

Coffee on the shelf

Photograph: JAVA Coffee Roasters