The IKAWA has become...
an invaluable tool for coffee roasters around the world. Its small footprint, customizability, and ease-of-use makes it something extremely important to the business of roasting and developing coffees. The fact that I can take it home in the trunk of my Mazda MX5 and roast in my kitchen without setting off a fire alarm is an achievement in itself. This is what motivated me to do a video about this extremely useful piece of specialty coffee gear.
In this video I'll show you the process I go through with the IKAWA to sample roast new coffees. Developing a better understanding of their intricacies is hugely important in choosing new coffees to serve at Leap Coffee. It will give you an idea of what a coffee will taste like under different roasting profiles. But it also will give you vital information like the temperature of first crack. This can assist you in developing your full scale roasters profile to aim for the ideal timeline to avoid roasting too quickly, or slowly. This also will minimize wasting coffees. Tossing out a full size batch is basically throwing out the hard work at origin, and the money spent on specialty grade coffees.
Overall the IKAWA is a huge step forward in sample roasting. You can pack it up and take it almost anywhere. You can save profiles which gives you consistency. It's accompanying application is simple, easy to navigate, and allows on-the-fly changes. The only real downside is the upfront cost of the roaster, but considering how much time and green coffee goes into developing coffees it's well worth the cost of admission for a medium to large scale roasting program.
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February 26, 2020
[…] compared the final product (after a few days to let the beans rest) to the same coffee from the Ikawa sample roaster I use at work. I was very impressed with the results of this test, and how well […]