Ikawa home roaster or something else? - Page 3

Recommendations for buyers and upgraders from the site's members.
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zix
Posts: 484
Joined: 18 years ago

#21: Post by zix »

Just like to mention that if you use the oven you don't need an app, you don't need a special bean subscription and you don't need to worry about app upgrades locking you into a specific consumer behaviour.
It is possible that the total cost of everything with the IKAWA and similar concepts adds up to be the same as when you use cheaper equipment like e.g. your oven. It is also possible that a roaster like the IKAWA is your only chance at enjoying home roasting in your environment, and that you know it is so, maybe because of local regulations - in that case, feel free to ignore me.

But for the vast majority reading this, even if you live in densely populated areas, I just don't want to have you believe that IKAWA or similar solutions is your only choice. At the very least, you should be able to find and use a cheap electric hot air popcorn popper, which essentially does the same thing as IKAWA.
LMWDP #047

ira
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Posts: 5497
Joined: 16 years ago

#22: Post by ira »

If you have the money and if the 100 gram limit is not an issue, the Ikawa is an awesome roaster. It repeats better than anything else I've ever used. I've gotten consistently really good to great coffee from a popper, very occasional great coffee from a Behmor, both stock and highly modified.

The downside of the Ikawa Home is programming, but once you have a profile, it will follow that profile perfectly every time and the coffee will come out the same every time.

Ira

mariowar
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Posts: 91
Joined: 16 years ago

#23: Post by mariowar »

dbdnt wrote: Third party beans as in non-Ikawa? Do you pay for the upgraded app or are you using the default profiles?
Non IKAWA.
I am using the Ikawa espresso profiles matching non Ikawa beans origin.
For washed processed beans, I manually stop the roast after 1:40 into first crack. For naturals after 1 minute. 100 g

BogongTiger
Posts: 18
Joined: 2 years ago

#24: Post by BogongTiger »

romaen wrote:Hey, I would like to start roasting my beans at home... but I am not sure which home roaster to get.
What I am looking for:
  • Easy to get started
  • Preferable indoor roaster
  • consistent results
The Ikawa sounds as if it would meet those requirements based on the comments I've been reading here. It probably depends on on how deeply you want to get into the intricacies and possibilities of roasting.

I've been using a Gene Café for the past 14 years and it has met those requirements (for me). I roast 250g each time, with two of them (or more) in a session. 500 g green beans usually yields about 400-420 g roasted, the way I roast. The Gene can emit smoke, especially if you go to second crack, which I often do as I like medium/dark roasts. (Edit: the amount of smoke also depends on the variety as well as roasting level. Some produce no smoke or almost none.) I run it under the range hood and turn on the fan to get rid of any smoke/coffee smell. Some people run an exhaust pipe from the chaff collector out a window, which works even better I'd imagine.

Before that I used a popcorn maker, which helped me understand how roasting coffee works.

I use the Gene to have a ready supply of a variety of fresh and nice tasty beans rather than to explore roasting for its own sake. (Although I do experiment with different roasting levels and blends.) People who are really into roasting will get more expensive (small) roasters with full-on monitoring equipment, or they might opt for a Coretto (heat gun and old breadmaker).

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Ypuh
Posts: 312
Joined: 3 years ago

#25: Post by Ypuh »

I recently got into home coffee roasting and the data side is what drew my attention. To be fair; the Ikawa is what drew my attention, but I quickly ran into a few red flags such as the subscription model for the App and focus on purchasing their greens (which are grossly overpriced).

I guess it all works and you get fresh beans from Ikawa and all, but we have so many good coffee roasters in our country that freshness and fair prices are easy to come by. If you just buy greens from Ikawa at $30/kg, roast them using their profile and then consume them, then why not buy them freshly roasted from $30/kg including shipping from a professional roastery and not lock yourself into a system? There's no real freshness or price benefit in my particular case. It also doesn't help they're a British company and wanted to leave the EU so badly. I'd rather ship something from China than the UK nowadays, so that's what I did.

If you want a computer controlled machine, take a look at the Hottop 2K+, Kaleido M2 Pro or Kaffeelogic Nano7 and Bullet R1. All of them have less of that initial attraction which Ikawa very succesfully created, but they can offer you more of a roasting experience including all the data.
I don't want a Decent

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