The award-winning roaster and barista reflects on communist Romania, where coffee was a precious commodity—and how she, and her country, have grown since then.
BY MICHAEL BUTTERWORTH
FOR BARISTA MAGAZINE
Photos by Paula Detesan
Delia Avram is playing chess with her son, Vladimir, at her coffee shop, Rox Specialty Coffee, in Baia Mare, Romania, when Barista Magazine calls. Delia turns the camera around on her phone to display the board.
“I lost for the first time,” she says, sounding a little surprised. Mostly she is proud of her son, though. Competition, after all, runs in the family. Delia is just back at her café after a whirlwind trip to the Victoria Arduino factory in Belforte del Chienti, Italy.
“I won best barista skills at a competition at the CoffeEast festival,” she says. “The prize was a visit to the factory.”
The trip to Italy is the latest addition to a long list of coffee competition accolades. Most notably, Delia won the Roast Masters competition in Milan in 2023, and the Romanian Barista Championship in 2019. In 2024, Delia competed in the Romanian Barista and Brewers Cup competitions on the same day, and placed top six in both.
“I’m a sporty person. I like to compete. I like to win,” she says.
But Delia is not simply a coffee competition contender. She’s a serial entrepreneur who balances competing with running multiple businesses, including her café, Rox, and the wholesale coffee roaster Arusha Roastery.
Delia’s varied accomplishments in the coffee industry are perhaps surprising considering that when she first worked as a barista, Delia didn’t drink coffee. “I loved the smell of coffee, but I never liked the taste,” she says. “I never understood why people drank it.”
In Delia’s family, however, coffee was a cherished ritual. “My mom would have me make coffee in the morning with a Moka pot. She would tell me to make sure I got all of the coffee out,” she says.
In communist Romania, coffee was a precious commodity. With wide shortages and bans on imports, most Romanians in the 1980s brewed a beverage called Nechezol, a coffee substitute made from roasted oats and chickpeas and that only contained trace amounts of actual coffee. So Delia’s parents relied on work trips abroad for coffee procurement.
“My dad was bringing coffee from Germany because it wasn’t easy to buy during the communist era,” says Delia. “My parents were not able to find coffee in the supermarket. Even if you had money, there was nothing to buy; the shelves were empty.”
Romania’s communist dictatorship ended in December 1989, and Delia was born a few weeks later in January 1990. The 1990s were a turbulent time in Romania as the new government initiated reforms and privatized industry. By the 2000s, however, the economy was growing and city centers like Bucharest soon were home to a growing number of specialty-coffee shops, including Coftale, an early pioneer in the Romanian specialty-coffee scene.
Based on a friend’s recommendation, Delia agreed to try a coffee there. “I ordered a cappuccino. I remember it even today,” she says. “I tried it before adding sugar. It was good.”
On a whim, Delia asked the owner for a job. “I wanted to know why the coffee here was so different than all of the coffee I tasted,” she says. Delia got the job and threw herself into her new vocation.
“What I always do in life, no matter the subject, I try to understand. I look for the best people in the field and read their work. I start from there,” she says. “I try to understand the theory, and start with the practical.”
From Disqualified to Champion
A turning point in Delia’s career occurred when she discovered barista competitions—she immediately knew she wanted to compete. She entered the 2017 Romanian Barista Championship with little background information and only a vague idea of what she wanted to say.
“I was very underprepared. I had the idea in my mind. I never did a routine start to end,” says Delia. “I was not able to serve my signature drink, and I was disqualified.”
Many first-time competitors would view getting disqualified as a crushing defeat, but Delia was inspired to come back more prepared the following year. More importantly, she realized she liked being on stage.
“I found out I love doing this. I actually enjoyed being there,” says Delia. “I really enjoyed making coffee for the judges.”
By this time, Delia had relocated to Cluj, Romania’s second-largest city, and was working for Meron, a roaster-retailer with more than 20 locations around the country. Armed with a larger support team and with access to higher-end microlots, Delia prepared for the 2018 Romania Barista Championship in a more regimented fashion.
“I went from being disqualified to being second place,” she says. But rather than being excited at the dramatic improvement, Delia discovered a frustrating mistake in the competitor debriefing. “I lost first place because I forgot the napkins,” says Delia. Napkins are one of the mandatory accessories for World Coffee Events barista competition, and the points deducted for having missed this detail were enough to move Delia from first to second place. “That made me more motivated to work harder, be cleaner and more efficient, to choose a coffee and deliver it the best way I can brew it,” she says.
She also learned a valuable lesson about coffee competitions: “Read the rules. Read them twice. Know them by heart,” she says.
The third time would prove to be the charm for Delia. In 2019, Delia won the Romanian Barista Championship and would go on to represent her country at the World Barista Championship in Boston. The chance to represent your entire country on a global scale “affirms all of the work you’ve put in,” she says.
Delia’s proudest achievement in the coffee industry, however, was winning the Roast Masters competition at the Milan Coffee Festival in 2023. The title came with a large cash prize, but Delia was most excited to celebrate winning with her younger brother, who worked as her assistant throughout the competition. “I was so happy because we did it, and he was there to help me,” she says.
Homeward Bound
Despite her numerous achievements and growing reputation, the challenges of balancing career and family began to catch up with Delia.
“As Vladimir started to grow, I began to miss my family,” she says. “Cluj is a big city. I was waking up. Making food for my kid. Taking him to kindergarten. Working in the roastery. I didn’t have time for a coffee.”
Delia decided to move to Baia Mare to be closer to family. She even considered leaving the coffee industry. “Moving back home, I was forced to see what I could do,” she says.
Baia Mare is a relatively small city of approximately 100,000 people, so when Delia returned, she was surprised to find the specialty-coffee market had already been tapped. A café crawl around her hometown, however, revealed some white space to Delia.
“There was no place that delivered the experience I was expecting,” she says. “I wanted to have a place as a statement so I can show people how hospitality should be.”
Delia quickly found a possible location, but had a limited budget for remodeling. “We opened a coffee shop with only 40,000 euros,” she says. “We had to renovate everything. I learned the hard way how construction works.”
With her limited budget going toward the remodeling, there wasn’t money left over for an espresso machine. A loaner machine from Meron allowed Delia to open Rox and turn a profit, enabling her to buy her own equipment. “In the big picture, you need to take care of the people, the place, the plants—it’s not only coffee,” she says.
Despite the challenges, Delia’s reputation as a barista champion helped build the brand. “We did no marketing online,” she says. “People knew I moved back home and opened a coffee shop.”
It seemed Delia’s dream was finally coming together when she faced an unexpected hurdle. “A few months after we opened, the Ukrainian war started. Everyone was really scared,” she says.
Baia Mare is just 70 kilometers from the Ukrainian border, and residents were worried that Russian missiles might strike their city. Soon, the city was welcoming Ukrainian refugees fleeing the conflict.
“I said, ‘OK, we’re going to brew coffee. We don’t want to run away or move from here. We will be here brewing coffee for whoever comes by,’” she recalls.
A Countryside Roastery
When Rox Specialty Coffee first opened, Delia looked to Meron to be her wholesale roaster. But that didn’t last long. When she was employed by Meron, Delia worked in sourcing green coffee, roasting, and quality control. She had traveled to the London School of Coffee to take roasting courses with Specialty Coffee Association instructor Morten Münchow.
As Rox got up and running, Delia found herself missing roasting. And the work she had done at Meron, she says, “gave me the confidence I needed.”
Delia supplemented her roasting education by reading books by longtime specialty-coffee professionals Scott Rao and Rob Hoos. “I started doing the experiments in the books—I wasn’t just reading,” she says. “It took me a year to assimilate all of this information and make it my own.”
Now, while running Rox Specialty Coffee, Delia began to imagine what it would be like to open her own roastery. “In the roastery, you need to focus on the coffee. I wanted it to be a quiet place with beautiful scenery. I chose a village near my city,” says Delia.
There was only one problem: The remote structure she wanted to build out didn’t have electricity. “It’s very difficult. Almost impossible,” she says of the process of bringing electricity out to the building. “It took us four or five months.”
But Delia was determined to make the space work. She purchased a P-III series, 5-kilo gas Probat coffee roaster, which arrived before the building was wired for electricity. Ever resourceful, Delia “started roasting on a generator. We didn’t have the luxury to wait—we had big bills to pay,” she says.
For Delia, opening Arusha Roastery allowed her to source and roast coffees that expressed her personality and roasting philosophy. “It’s not the perfect way to brew coffee, it’s the way Delia likes it,” she says. Even the decision to name her roasting brand Arusha, a rare coffee variety grown in Tanzania, reflects Delia’s decision to center coffee’s origin.
“We source coffee from all around the world. We deliver three origins on espresso and five on filter,” she says. “Arusha is a statement that we care about coffee.”
Looking to the Future
As an established barista competitor and business owner, it would be easy for Delia to rest on her laurels. But even as she prepares to welcome her second child, she also has plans for the future that focus on community building and consumer education.
“We’ve been guiding people how to brew coffee for some years now. We made some videos during the pandemic, mostly to not repeat myself,” Delia says. “Those videos went viral on YouTube.”
Now Delia is almost ready to launch a Romanian-language platform for consumer coffee education, complete with new video modules. “People need to know more. Sequential steps. I can teach you. It’s not rocket science,” she says.
But make no mistake, Delia is not retiring from the competition scene any time soon. “I still want to go back to the Worlds,” she says. “I have something to say there.”
This article originally appeared in the October + November 2025 issue of Barista Magazine. Read more of the issue online here for free.
Michael Butterworth (he/him) is an Authorized SCA Trainer and the co-founder of Etkin Design. He publishes the The Coffee Compass on Substack.
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