Our story
Umaña is a coffee roastery based in Sofia, Bulgaria.
The project grew from years of working with specialty coffee through Drekka — a store dedicated to carefully selected coffees, teas and craft beverages.
Over time, roasting became a natural continuation of that work.
From Drekka to Umaña
Before there was Umaña, there was Drekka. And there still is.
More than ten years ago, Drekka began as a small specialty coffee project built around curiosity, quality and a desire to share better coffee with more people.
Over the years, it gave us the opportunity to discover coffees from producers, importers and roasters from around the world.
Every bag that arrived carried a different story - different origins, different processing methods, different ways of expressing flavour...
Before Umaña
The more coffee we tasted, the more questions we had.
- Why did two coffees from the same country taste completely different?
- How much of flavour was shaped by processing?
- What happened between harvest and cup?
That curiosity eventually led us beyond serving coffee and towards understanding it more deeply.
And ultimately, towards roasting it ourselves.
Building a roastery
Roasting wasn’t really part of the plan.
In 2023, Martina somehow convinced Hristo to roast a coffee for the Bulgarian AeroPress Championship. There was only one small problem: we weren’t roasters.
We were, however, very curious about coffee. Sometimes a little too curious. Around the same time, on our way back from World of Coffee, we made another perfectly reasonable decision: we ordered a ROEST.
And that was pretty much the beginning of it. We started looking for coffees we genuinely wanted to drink and figuring out how to roast them. The first was Cordillera del Fuego and we still remember its cinnamon-ish profile.
Was the roast perfect? Absolutely not.
But it was enough to make us want to try again. And again.
What started as an experiment slowly became something we took very seriously. We roasted, tasted, changed things, roasted again. We got better. We also got much better at admitting when a roast wasn’t very good.
Today Umaña continues that same process.