Peter Wolff informs on the IKAWA Pro Sample Roaster

WOLFF WEEKLY VLOGG 040 | Peter Wolff Reviews the IKAWA Pro Sample Roaster

Hello my name is Peter Wolff and welcome to Wolff College of Coffee’s Vlogg. Today we’re going to be talking about the IKAWA Pro and share my personal experiences with using this wonderful product in the last six months.

So I guess where do we start? It is definitely a sample roaster. It does roast a batch from thirty up to about sixty grams. We’re running it for about thirty grams for our particular samples. I think what it brings to the table is a high degree of control to developing a profile that suits the sample cupping and evaluation. It definitely does what it needs to do, and that is gives me lots of repeatability it also allows me to understand and bring out the nuances, flavours, acidity, body, balance - these sort of areas that we’re looking for at a cupping profile for our coffees, without the elements of the heaviness of the roast taking over.

I really love the fact that it is a very collaborative instrument in that we can share profiles very easily with another IKAWA user anywhere around the world by emailing that or by going to their online library, their reference library, and downloading or looking at other people’s approaches to either similar farms or varietals or processing methods and using that as possibly a starting point.

I definitely don’t see this as something you can roast kilos and kilos on. It’s just not designed for that kind of roasting. We’ve given it a fairly good run these last couple of six months, we’ve done all of our Kenyan and Ethiopian and a lot of our Central American cupping off this. We tend to find, particularly here in the tropical areas of Queensland we did find that after we got to that 25th, 26th roast it did start to overheat a little bit. We did start to lose a bit of consistency in terms of the profiling. That withstanding, that’s a fairly high work rate. So I think for a small to medium sized roasting business, it would certainly suit you down to the ground. If you were a green importer and you were needing to roast large volumes of coffee that obviously it would have some question marks. You may need to bank a few of them up to be able to manage the output.

But overall, it’s a brilliant product. It’s great value for money, it’s very well supported. Definitely if you’re wanting to know some more information go to the IKAWA website. So I think it’s IKAWA.com. There’s some more information and they’ve obviously got their own independent videos there as well. The other thing is go to the apple store and download the app and have a bit of a look at that. It is only on an iOS platform at the moment. It gives you the opportunity then to click on the pull down menu and look at the online library and look at some of the other reference profiles that have been posted by other users around the world.

It’s a brilliant product. It certainly has brought the laboratory closer to the grower or the origin. My first sort of experience with this was using it with our producer in Kenya, Mr Boyce Harries, who has Chania and Oreti Estates. We’ve both been sharing each other’s profiles and our approaches to roasting the different coffees. It’s been a wonderful tool and a wonderful experience. I have no hesitations recommending it and would definitely put that on my considerations list for a possible sample roaster in your business. Thanks for stopping in.