“I’ll admit it — I first approached the IKAWA Professional Sample Roaster with a more than healthy degree of scepticism. It seemed too easy to use, too convenient and too polished a product to deliver on professional expectations of quality. It was one of those rare times where I was delighted to be proven wrong.”

“I’ve worked in and around the coffee industry for some time. I have recently founded Coffee Sourcing where I provide independent coffee sourcing services to roasting companies looking to transition between buying spot coffees on importer lists, and having their own dedicated coffee buyer. Before that I’ve been Project Manager with Square Mile Coffee Roasters, Director of Operations at Workshop Coffee Co, as well as distributing A Film About Coffee in the UK and Ireland, coffee judge in the Young British Foodies Awards and am currently Commercial Director of the World AeroPress Championship – during this time I’ve seen a lot of innovation in the speciality coffee sector, and delighted to be one of the early users of the IKAWA roasters.

As an independent coffee buyer working on behalf of quality-driven clients there are two things that are crucial to how I work; one is accuracy and the other is flexibility. In preparing roasted samples for evaluation, having roasting equipment that’s finicky or unpredictable is no good to me. I need the roast recipe for each batch to be precise and repeatable, and this is precisely what the IKAWA Professional roaster offers.

Despite my early scepticism I got in touch with the guys at IKAWA and borrowed one of their roasters for a few weeks, putting it to work for some of the most discerning coffee tasters I’ve ever worked alongside.

Not only is the roast quality offered by the IKAWA as good as that of a traditional burner and barrel sample roaster, in my experience to date, it’s usually better. Better clarity of flavour, better consistency from batch-to-batch, and a cinch to operate. Couple all this with the ability to share an exact recipe with my clients via email for them to load onto their own IKAWA roaster, wherever they happen to be in the world, I can have complete confidence that what I’m tasting is what they’re tasting.

For example this is a roast profile I recently used when preparing a cupping of washed Kenyan and Rwandan samples, I used 50g of green for each roast – click on link to view it, and see roast profile below.

Tim Williams Kenya sample roast 50g: 4 mins and 50 seconds, end temperature 204 degrees C

At first, I couldn’t imagine how a small, beautiful and iPad-operated piece of machinery that I’d be happy to have on display in my kitchen could possibly live up to the standards of my new business. And now I can’t imagine the business without it.”

Guest blog by Tim Williams.

Find out more about Coffee Sourcing, and Tim’s newest contribution to the coffee industry, Bureaux Collective.

For any questions about the IKAWA Pro Sample Roaster, contact Bradley on bradley@ikawacoffee.com