Artisan Coffee in N. America: May 2023

IKAWA Lands at Artisan Lab!

Back in May we bought our first Ikawa Sample roaster and we couldn’t be happier! We’re so grateful to roaster/customer Gooseneck Coffee in Plymouth, Michigan, for staying in touch with us as they were transitioning out of this Ikawa and into a new Kafelogic sample roaster. Ikawa roasters are high grade, professional quality roasters, so being able to purchase one used seemed to have the best of both worlds to us: 1. Steep upgrade in sample roasting capacity and quality, and 2. Moderate price due to not paying for a brand-new machine.

Added bonus - I got to know our roaster/customers Noah Salter and Bill Streicher better during the purchase and testing process! It was a great learning experience! Noah showed me how to use the profiles that can be downloaded onto the Ikawa app. We tested a few roasts while the machine was still at Gooseneck, and I saw how he moved through the sequence of adding beans, letting the machine warm up (~ 1 min), dropping the beans into the chamber and watching while the machine runs the selected profile. It’s fun to watch the intake temp and outtake temp curves rising and falling as the roast progresses. It’s impressive how you can drop a mark when first crack happens and how the machine follows the profile precisely. I also love how we can easily adjust the profile’s temp and time with small finger movements on the screen.

With Ikawa power in our lab, we are moving through our recent mountain of fresh crop arrivals at turbo speed! The capacity to roast 6+ samples per hour has vastly increased productivity in our sample lab over the 2/hour roasts we could do on our Behmore 1600. We have Marie Hucal, Logistics Manager, on our team who is also an experienced production and sample roaster. She has dialed in profiles that work great for our:

Rwanda Carbonic maceration
Rwanda Natural
Rwanda Fully Washed
Ethiopia Natural

Let us know if you have an Ikawa and you’d like us to share any of these profiles! Another advantage of the Ikawa is that we can easily send a profile to you as an email attachment.

What will happen to our Behmore? Not retirement! It’s a bit used, but we hope to bring it to Kopakaki Cooperative in Rwanda, which is building a new lab and so far, they don’t have a sample roaster. We hope our trusty Behmore can help them along until they are also able to buy an Ikawa!