MABO Coffee Roasters (EN)

12 Feb, 2021

New month, new story. For February giveaway I chose MABO Coffee Roastery, from Bucharest.

The roastery was founded by Bogdan Georgescu, together with his friend Marius Beju, both coffee enthusiasts. The origin of the name relates to their names, MABO representing the first 2 letters of each one’s surname. Sounds cool, and their originality reflects on the packaging too, who doesn’t remember the funky colorful faces on the coffee box? Love them.

Bogdan is the 2019 World Coffee Roasting Vice-Champion and 2019 Romania Roasting Champion. The world competition took place in Taipei, he competed against 22 other countries, the biggest number of participating countries in a roastery contest. It’s safe to say that he deserves all the reputation and appreciation that came with the winning.

This was the motivation for starting his own business, having people come around to drink the coffee of the world’s vice-champion and ask “when will we be able to drink your own signature coffee?”. Starting with 2020, a small roastery on Vulturilor 31 Street, Bucharest, Romania, came to life and its coffee is now sold in more than 60 places in the country as well as internationally.

Curious thing about MABO’s story is that Bogdan is a former IT person. Being a rather technical/technological person, I’d say that he chose the roastery as it was the closest thing to what he was doing before. You do need to use some technology when roasting coffee, so still computers. Quite handy for him, right?

But he started with the beginning. As all people who go big in everything, he started with questions, first of them being “how can one improve its morning coffee”?

Typical IT guy, Bogdan didn’t only change the daily coffee he was drinking. Instead, he bought a small coffee roasting oven and ROASTED HIS OWN COFFEE! Well, that’s something, isn’t it? He continued to learn by using it and in time he bought a second roaster which produced “decent drinkable coffee”, he says.

Later on he started working for SLOANE Coffee Roastery and this experience brought him good things, such as training, competitions, and most important vision development towards the coffee world.

The coffee you can find in their roastery is imported from countries such as Colombia, Ethiopia, Brazil, Kenya, Rwanda or Peru. MABO doesn’t only buy green beans from big sellers, but also from micro-lots, so coffee from sellers who only have a few hundred kilograms available. This is how they manage to have rarities, coffee with very high SCA score, sometimes even coffee for which they are the only seller in the world. Quite cool, right?

I bought an Ethiopian coffee from them, the one I want to use in my February giveaway, and they were super cool and gifted me a second coffee, from Brazil, honey processed. I loved this last one so much, that I will be using it in my giveaway, instead of the “classical” Ethiopian one.

Honey processing means that the coffee beans are de-pulped and allowed to dry without being washed. This is cool, the less water is used, the better for the environment. Besides, after the fermentation of the remaining pulp on the beans, the final coffee will have some medium-high acidity and it will also be more sweet, hence the melon notes in this coffee.