The first Specialty Coffee Association-certified campus in Warsaw is an open space for learning and collaboration in Eastern Europe.
BY KAIE BIRD
SPECIAL TO BARISTA MAGAZINE ONLINE
Cover photo courtesy of Kryspin Waliszewski
There has been a lot of buzz and attention surrounding the entire Eastern European specialty-coffee scene recently, and for good reason. Warsaw, Poland, will be hosting the 2020 World of Coffee in June, as well as its own Warsaw Coffee Festival in March. In the early build-up to World of Coffee, we’re taking a look today at the new beginnings of Raf&Co Coffee Campus. It’s the first of its kind in Eastern Europe that is approved to teach all of the Specialty Coffee Association’s modules (barista, brewing, green, and roasting), as well as certify and train individuals for the Q-Grader License.
The three collaborators involved in the new campus are all seasoned professionals in their own right—Rafael Mlodzianowski, Janina Laszkiewicz, and Stefan Waliszewski are leaders, even pioneers, in their own coffee communities. The creation of this new campus based in Warsaw places a big focus on moving forward as a team. In combining their talents and skills, they hope to establish a space that invites people involved at every stage in the coffee chain to come together, learn, and exchange ideas and knowledge with one another.
Two years ago, Raf Mlodzianowski’s idea to create a campus was first conceived in London, his home base at the time, although it was hard to find partners who were in the position to take risks. “With Brexit happening, some people were leaving England, and then because of those new openings in companies, others were being promoted and weren’t really interested in taking a risk to build up something brand-new,” Raf explains. That’s when he decided to visit Warsaw, the city that had become the transfer hub during his consulting trips for his first business, RafMakes. His goal was to look more closely at the local Polish coffee scene to see if there was an opening for his campus idea to take hold and flourish.
Raf spent the next year traveling to Warsaw more regularly, getting more engaged with the local community and industry. During one of those trips, he ended up meeting one of the future partners of Raf&Co, Stefan Waliszewski, who was already looking into the idea of bringing a smaller Besca Showroom to the city. Stefan, a Warsaw native, has been involved in the Polish coffee scene for many years, importing green coffee and roasting for many cafés in the city, and is someone who knows the local market well. Raf&Co’s third partner, Janina Laszkiewicz, was Raf’s first international client, and had brought him over to Belarus to lead trainings. Later at the Budapest World of Coffee Expo, Janina and Raf ran into one another and joked about opening a campus in Warsaw someday.
“This campus, that’s where my journey has really come full circle at this point, from making coffee without knowing much about it to consuming coffee and wanting to know more,” Raf says, “then transitioning into becoming an AST trainer [in 2015] and teaching, heading to origins, consulting, and completing the bean to cup for me.” This is how the campus, for Raf, fits into his continued growth in the industry. While the main idea for the new coffee campus was primarily based around what Raf had already built with RafMakes, the new project needed other people to keep it growing and developing. “It’s a transition from my original company into something new. The ‘Co’ points to our mission statement, reinforcing that this project is a collaboration community,” Raf elaborates.
An important aim for the coffee campus is to offer a wide range of options to appeal to a broad audience. The idea is to have “something between free, very cheap, moderate, slightly expensive, and then the expensive courses/trainings. There is always something for everybody,” Raf shares.
“A real testament to that concept is when we had the Polish Roasters Championship here a few weeks ago. People were turning around and saying to us, ‘This is great!’ They’ve been roasting for some years and have never really sat and spoken to another roaster properly about what they do,” Raf explains. “It’s these sort of things that we are trying to facilitate here. That’s really what the ‘Co’ is for, is so that I can stop working on my own and start creating more of an open knowledge community that supports the people who are trying to support other people in coffee.”
Raf&Co Coffee Campus offers a space to play, be curious, educate and learn, and then to go out and push coffee forward—it might be exactly what our industry needs right now.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kaie Bird is a coffee professional and event organizer based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Kaie also writes and travels often, seeking to find and highlight future trends in specialty coffee around the world. Follow her coffee adventures on Instagram or through Sharing Tables on Facebook.
