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Updated on Jan 03, 2026
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Mała Czarna – Good Vibes, Varieties and Voyages to Origin
The roastery Mała Czarna sits near Wrocław’s Olympic Stadium. Getting there means driving through one of the most beautiful green spaces of the city. Then you walk into what is absolutely not your typical roastery. There’s a wall covered in basketballs. Colorful lights, vintage espresso machines, bicycles on shelves. And somewhere between all that: serious equipment and the kind of technical precision you’d expect from someone with a physics degree.
This is the story of Mała Czarna. They roast exceptional specialty coffee and they like to have a good time doing it.
How Mała Czarna Started in Wrocław
We met Kacper Krzan, the founder of Mała Czarna, on a grim October morning in 2025 at is coffee shop in the Szczytnicki park. Inside the atmosphere is cozy. While warming up with a cup of coffee Kacper talks about how he got into coffee. He spent a decade working in IT for companies like Oracle. After getting his degree in physics and economics, he embarked on the whole corporate track. Then he realized he had no life working around the clock and switched to coffee. That was about ten years ago. He’d started roasting for fun, then just stopped everything else to focus on it full-time.
The technical background stuck around though. He approaches coffee with the same analytical mindset he once applied to software systems, understanding extraction variables with the precision of someone who actually studied physics. “For me the perfect espresso is everything.”, he says. But unlike his IT days, now he gets to throw parties in his roastery and spend harvest season in Brazil.
Mała Czarna opened the café where we met Kacper nine years ago in the Olympic Park area. The neighborhood wasn’t on the coffee map at the time. “When I was younger I lived near here. It’s a beautiful spot. People need a place to rest for a moment, and our cafe allows you to enjoy your coffee with a view.”It’s small but busy. The kind of place where locals stop by regularly. Their second location on Strachocińska is bigger, about 160 square meters, and attracts a different clientele. “People go there for high quality coffee. They usually order black coffee rather than milk-based drinks.”
The Roasting Operation
After finishing the coffee we took a short drive to the roastery. Mała Czarna roasts only specialty coffee, about 1,000 to 1,200 kilos per week. The operation supplies about 90 cafés across the Lower Silesia region. They don’t push into Warsaw or larger Polish cities much. “We simply don’t have the time, and coffee quality is our priority.” They focus on micro-lots, sometimes only six to ten bags. “We believe if a coffee is exceptional, you should buy the whole lot.”
They work with various suppliers, sometimes through larger importers like Neumann Kaffee Gruppe. “That can be easier and more affordable for a small company like us.” They also cooperate with projects like Colombia’s Clearpath Project.
Their roast approach varies by coffee and intended use. Using a clever color-coded system, coffee drinkers are guided from comforting, classic chocolates to wild, high-acid micro-lots that score 89+ points. Current offerings include coffees like El Morito from Guatemala, a Cup of Excellence entry.
Discover Coffee from Mała Czarna
Producing Arara Coffee in Brazil
Five years ago, Mała Czarna bought a plot of land in Brazil of around 7 hectares on the São Pedro de Canastra Farm. They’re exclusively growing a variety called Arara, a relatively new Brazilian cultivar that’s been developed and selected over the last decade. “It tastes different from typical Brazilian profiles. I would say it sits somewhere between Colombian and Guatemalan flavor profiles. It can be extremely clean and well balanced”, Kacper told us. He spends more than a month there during harvest. “You need to be there, give feedback about what European customers expect, and build trust,” he explained.
In 2025 the Arara harvest was good enough that they were preparing to submit it to Brazil’s Cup of Excellence. “The coffee tasted great, humidity and processing were right, everything looked very promising.” A few years ago, some samples scored in the low 90s, which is exceptional for Brazil. “When you cup it, the first reaction is often, wow, it’s so bright.”
Training and Education
Mała Czarna runs SCA-style courses like barista training, brewing training, the full range. “For us, training is essential. The barista needs to understand extraction and flavor to produce consistent quality.” The founder’s emphasis is on cup tasting above all. “You must learn to recognize flavors and articulate what you’re tasting. That ability to communicate is crucial when you talk with farmers and roasters.”
Beyond the Cup
Mała Czarna experiments with coffee in many ways. They’ve done barrel-aged processing for an Arara lot, adding another layer of complexity to the cup. They make coffee chocolate using ground coffee and a special manufacturing process. They even produce coffee ice cream using Arara paste as the base, collaborating with local chocolatiers and ice cream makers to develop the right textures.
