Hi,
I saw that some of the members on HB are Ikawa Home owners. Are you willing to share successful profiles (espresso) for:
Guatemala-Delicia SHB, Brazil Y. Bourbon, India Parchment, Monsooned Malabar (arabica)...or any other?

Thanks,
Cheers!

Someone
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Hello! 'someone' here.

I'm a new owner of the latest Ikawa Home (100g) roaster. I was hoping there'd be more recipe sharing amongst Ikawa users - perhaps their new model will kick things up a bit. So far I'm really liking the machine and I'm hoping it can do justice to the ~25lbs of green beans I've accumulated - I'm encouraged.

My tastes lately have swung towards darker roasts for espresso, so that will color my recipes (pun unintended). For some reason, Ikawa's recipes won't go past a medium (American/City) roast, so I'm left to figure out how to go darker. My plan is to start with Ikawa's curated recipes and apply the minimum modifications needed to achieve the desired results. Despite the new model's 100g capacity, I'm using closer to 50g doses to better track the temperature profile - that may also confer some level of compatibility with the previous Ikawa models.

It's not my goal to burn my or anyone else's house down, fry the machine, ruin green beans, etc., but I assert that it's the user's responsibility if they use any recipes posted here, at their own risk. That said, here goes, and here's hoping this thread gets some activity!

Note: I've edited my earlier version of this post (below).

I'm new to the Ikawa and liking it so far, but it's not roasting as dark as I'd like. So this is my attempt to learn how to hit the darker roast levels.

Started with Ikawa's Mexican Huatusco green beans, and their recommended recipe for a dark espresso roast. My reasoning is that it was developed by people who's full-time job is to do that sort of thing, using beans they didn't have to pay for themselves, enabling them to experiment and tune more freely than I could.

Opened the recipe using the Android version of the Ikawa app, which still allows editing sans subscription. The edits can also be made in the free iOS app, but the graphic for the exact temperature readout is obscured (intentionally?). I then bumped up just the last three temperature setpoints about 10-15 degrees C, and added another 30 seconds to reach exactly 8 minutes for the roast 'cause I like integer numbers.

I don't have a color analyzer, so apologies for a measly photo:




I'm spitballing the roast levels, but what I'm calling City + finished first crack and had roasted quietly for at least a full minute before cooling. What I'm calling Full City just started 2C as cooling kicked in, the beans have a subtle shine that's not apparent in the photo, and a few of the beans show signs of cracked shells and cratering.

[EDIT]: Several days post-roast, the beans 'evolved' a tick further than my initial observations. The now-renamed Full City is showing a few light spots of oil on many of the beans, and virtually every bean of the now-renamed Full City+ is expressing oil. I think the key difference between the two roast levels was the peak temperature just seconds before cooling kicked in: 230C versus 235C spinning-bean-mass temperature. I'm losing confidence in listening for second crack as an indication, given that the 230C batch was silent and the 235C batch only produced a couple cracks before cooling. On the other hand, I'm gaining confidence in the Ikawa's ability to hit the proper 1C/2C levels and I plan to stop overshooting temperatures for the sake of audible cracks.

Below are the recipes I used to chase my dark demons. Batch size was limited to 60 grams so the beans could keep up with the profile, and yield exactly five batches from the 300g bag Ikawa gave me. These recipes should be editable in the iOS app without the subscription service, as these are considered "legacy" recipes.

"Full City"
https://share.ikawa.support/profile_hom ... uZWkxYgEw

"Full CIty+"
https://share.ikawa.support/profile_hom ... uELoBYgEw

I'm much happier with the color, uniformity, and aroma of the darker roasts. Apologies for the dark-roasting sacrilege inflicted on single-origin beans.

I consider this a magic moment in my nooby, first-time Ikawa-user experience, given the precision with which the machine bent to my will. I've placed a thermocouple in the roast chamber to directly monitor the air temperature around the beans, and adjusted the programmed temperature setpoints to hit the desired actual temperatures I wanted the beans to see. I asked it to to go up 10 degrees, and it went up... 10 degrees. Just the behavior needed when trying to thread the needle between baking and burning.

The full city ones look like ash.

I just roasted some Brazil Sweet Daterra Blue with those two profiles. First crack came about 30 seconds early, so I dropped the beans 30 seconds early. It's less than one day, but the results look and smell fine. Certainly not ash.

mmntip wrote:The full city ones look like ash.

LOL, yeah. One way to find the edge of the cliff, is to drive off it. I'm recovering from several pounds of Hawaiian Kona/Ka'u, which was roasted to the oily briquet level - so, I've seen much darker.

mgrayson wrote:I just roasted some Brazil Sweet Daterra Blue with those two profiles. First crack came about 30 seconds early, so I dropped the beans 30 seconds early. It's less than one day, but the results look and smell fine. Certainly not ash.

Checking with suppliers left me unclear if Sweet Daterra Blue is washed or natural (the Huatusco is washed). That might affect first crack timing - or did you mean second crack? One downside to custom recipes, is I can't mark expected crack points. Just gotta watch, listen, and decide as you did.

When I used those profiles on Polar espresso, I remember when FC started. With the "semi-washed" Sweet Daterra Blue, the FC came 30 seconds earlier, so I dumped the beans 30 seconds before the end. I also tried the earlier Full City curve that accelerates the heating in the last minute. Same thing happened there. FC was 30 seconds early, and I ended the roast 30 seconds early. Too soon to taste-test the differences. (Yes, I actually got cheap bowls for cupping, but these are all for espresso, so I may just do it that way.)

I have yet to learn what differentiates Washed profiles from Natural profiles. I can look at Ikawa curves, but I'd like to understand. It's easy to find information on the basics of roasting, but with the next level it's harder to get a coherent treatment. Reading a lot of threads in the roasting forum is helping, but when I try to dig down, it seems to stop at "well, this seems to work, and that doesn't". Even Rao's decreasing RoR is essentially an appeal to authority (I read his original paper on it). That doesn't mean that it's not a great methodology, just that it's hard to form any kind of larger understanding.

Still waiting on the 10 lbs of Guatemalan so I can start with a less complex baseline. Seems that shipping 10 lbs takes a lot longer than 5 or under...

Generaly I noticed that first crack is off by 30-40 seconds even in Ikawa's beans and profiles? What do you guys do then? What we need in app is something like "move to the next stage" button, or mark first crack button. I do not know if that is possible ...