Enklawa – A Roaster’s Journey from American Highways to Wrocław’s Old Town
The first thing you notice about Enklawa is not the coffee, though that comes quickly enough. It’s the sense that you’ve stepped into someone’s extended living room. When I visited the roastery’s second location in Wrocław’s Nadodrze district in October 2025, the owner Jarek greeted me with the kind of welcome that suggested we were picking up a conversation rather than starting one.
What followed was a two-hour conversation that wound through childhood memories of Balkan coffee rituals, the cab of an eighteen-wheeler crossing American highways, and the particular satisfaction of watching a Giesen roaster bring out the sweetness in a Colombian lot that numbered just four bags in the world. This is the story of Enklawa.
The Story Behind Enklawa
Jarek of Enklawa grew up in Wrocław during what he describes simply as “different times”. Poland in the 1980s was not a place where specialty coffee existed in any recognizable form, yet coffee itself was never absent from his household. His grandparents, originally from Yugoslavia, had brought their Balkan coffee culture with them. “I remember my grandma, she brewed her coffees in the morning and said it should be done a certain way,” he told me, the memory clearly still vivid decades later. “That was kind of magical to me as a little kid. I always tried her coffee.”
His first attempt at roasting came in the late 1980s, using nothing more sophisticated than an oven. The results, by his own admission, were terrible. “You cannot say I was a coffee roaster at all because I had no idea what I was doing. It was crappy coffee. Only my grandma loved it because she loved me.”
That childhood fascination would lie dormant for years, but it never disappeared entirely. Coffee, he says, was simply always there, a constant thread running through his life even as everything else changed.
From Wrocław to American Highways back to Wroclaw:
The Road That Led to Enklawa
Like many young Poles of his generation, he eventually made his way to the United States. What followed was a classic immigrant trajectory: dishwashing, kitchen work, the grinding labor of building a life from nothing. Eventually, he found his way behind the wheel of a semi-truck, an eighteen-wheeler hauling cargo across the vast American landscape. “The American dream,” he said with a wry smile when recounting this period. H eventually started his own trucking company, building a business that kept him busy. One of his regular customers was a coffee importer, and every week, as he picked up loads of green beans, he found himself talking more and more about coffee.
The importer was Cafe Imports, the Minnesota-based company that has become one of the most respected names in specialty coffee sourcing. Through these conversations, the dormant passion reignited. Someone suggested he visit their facilities, learn something about what happened to those beans between the farm and the cup.
“So actually, I went over there and I learned how to roast coffee,” he explained. “And I roasted with really, really good people like Joe Marracco. They taught me how to roast.”
The names he dropped are significant ones in the American specialty coffee world, professionals who have shaped how an entire generation thinks about roasting. He speaks of these mentors with genuine reverence, noting that “ten minutes with Joe Marrocco gives you plenty of knowledge. Like you could study months on the internet and not learn some things.”
He returned multiple times, each visit deepening his understanding. Eventually, he began roasting professionally, first as what he calls a “freelancer, hobby guy,” then for established roasteries in the Chicago area. His coffee appeared on shelves. People bought it. People liked it.
The validation was important, but something else was happening too. He was discovering that roasting wasn’t just something he could do, it was something that felt natural, almost instinctive. Allen Leibowitz, then head of the Roasters Guild, noticed it early on. “He told me, ‘You’re a natural. You know the answers. You don’t even sometimes know what you’re doing or how to do it, but you kind of know what to ask, when to ask, and how to roast.”
Two years before returning to Poland, he became a certified roaster through the SCA, training alongside Leibowitz himself. By then, the trucking company had been sold. A new chapter was ready to begin.
When Jarek and his wife decided to return to Poland, opening a roastery was never in question. The only question was where and how. He chose Hala Targowa, a historic market hall in Wrocław’s old town. But the building’s historic designation meant navigating a labyrinth of permits and bureaucratic requirements. Getting gas lines approved for a roasting operation in a protected building took nearly a year. Enklawa finally opened in 2019. Six months later, COVID-19 arrived.
“Wow,” he said, the single word carrying the weight of that period. The pandemic could have ended everything. Hotels and restaurants, the wholesale customers a young roastery depends on, shut down basically overnight. But something unexpected happened. The customers he had been carefully cultivating to become community, showed up supporting the roastery. “People helped us a lot. We opened a website almost overnight just to have a virtual store. I drove my car with coffees all over Wrocław. Every day I had a whole bunch of deliveries to individual buyers. This helped me a lot. We could survive. Otherwise, if not for this, I don’t know what would happen.”
“Just Have Fun”: The Philosophy Behind Enklawa’s Coffee Roasting
At the heart of Enklawa’s operation is a Giesen roaster. Jarek has roasted on Dietrich and Probat equipment, both respected names in the industry, but the Giesen holds a special place. “When I roast on Giesen, I wouldn’t imagine roasting anything else. This machine gives me so much potential and so much to play with, to roast differently each coffee, even the same coffee.” This last point is crucial to understanding his approach. Many roasters develop a profile for a particular bean and stick with it, consistency being, after all, what customers expect. But at Enklawa, the same coffee might be roasted differently across multiple batches, each iteration an experiment in what the bean might become. “After a few roasts, if I have two or three bags of the same coffee, I roast differently from time to time. Just to check what else I can do with this green bean. As you know, you can roast the same coffee different ways.”
The green beans come from importers he has known for years, Cafe Imports Europe (the European arm of his old Minnesota connection), Falcon Specialty, Nordic Approach. He doesn’t visit farms personally, but he trusts these importers implicitly, knowing that their reputations depend on consistent quality. “I know if they have a coffee, they will have good green beans. They know what they’re doing.”
Most of the time, he samples before committing to a lot. But not always. During my visit, I tasted a Colombian coffee from a producer named Nestlé Lescón, an Obonuco variety that the owner described as “one of the best from Colombia, if not the best.” The entire available quantity had been just four bags of twenty-four kilograms each. When Falcon offered one bag, he committed immediately, without tasting, while the coffee was still in Colombia. “I just put my hand on it. I wanted this coffee to be here.”
Discover Coffee from Enklawa
Ask the owner about his roasting philosophy and the answer is simply: “Just have fun. Because at the end, this is what matters, right? The cup of coffee. You can play with your roast profiles. You can think through the coffee so many times. But at the end, this is what is important. Just enjoy your job, know your equipment, and have fun. And everything else is going to be okay.”
His light roasts might seem too dark in Norway, too light in Greece—he acknowledges this with a shrug. Different markets want different things, and he refuses to judge other roasters for their choices. “If there is a roastery and they sell hundreds of tons of coffee, it means they do something good and the proper way. Otherwise, they wouldn’t exist.”
What he does care about, intensely, is investing in the right tools. “If you want to sell a high-quality product, using good beans, you need good equipment made by professionals.” The second Enklawa location, where we spoke, embodies this opinion. The Weber grinder, reportedly the first of its kind in Poland when he purchased it, sits alongside a Spirit espresso machine by Kees van der Westen.
Enklawa’s growth has been almost reluctant. Jarek never intended to become a major player in Polish specialty coffee, that wasn’t the point. The second location in Nadodrze opened only because customers kept asking for it, kept wanting a place to sit comfortably, and linger. “I chose this quiet residential area on purpose. Our focus is simple: good coffee, cakes, and music.” Within a year, four more specialty coffee venues opened in Nadodrze, a change he is welcoming. “Roasting is what I really do and like to do,” he told me as our conversation wound down. “I like to play with coffee and have fun.”
We had a great time test tasting some of Enklawas coffees. Jarek has a good feel for selecting unique taste profiles and highlighting the unique characteristics of these beans. Enklawa ships within Poland. See available beans here.