Alfonso Tupaz is the founder of Hatch Crafted, a cold brew coffee company based in Canada and have been IKAWA customers since May 2015.

We ran into him at London Coffee Festival and SCAA Atlanta earlier this year, and loved the chocolate and caramel notes coming through from Hatch’s ‘Signature Black’ cold brew. Perhaps there isn’t the awareness of cold brew coffee in the UK compared to hotter countries, but we were interested to understand how different (or similar) the IKAWA Pro Sample Roaster is for them.

OVER TO ALFONSO

“I’m the founder of Hatch – used to be in high speed primary packaging manufacturing – while roasting coffee by hand on the side. Hatch is a dedicated cold brew coffee company with a focus on single origin organic coffee. Hatch may be the largest dedicated cold brew manufacturer in North America, upwards of 50,000 bottles per day capacity. We do everything in-house – from roasting to brewing and bottling. Our proprietary tech allows us to extend shelf-life without heat.”

“We use our IKAWA Pro Sample Roaster for coffee sampling. It works well with the small green sample packs we receive.

I was originally drawn to the IKAWA as it has a small footprint, it’s ease of use, and ability to see the roast curve in real time and adjust on the app – and simply the innovation behind it.

It works pretty well for our application, which for coffee sampling. We found the IKAWA surprisingly easy to use – you won’t be disappointed (except that it’s limited to iOS)!

It wouldn’t allow us to completely transfer the profile curve on the IKAWA to our Loring production roaster, but it works for what it’s intended to do, which in our case is to determine if the coffee meets our target flavours and quality – and consequently affects our green coffee buying decisions.

We tend to use the IKAWA to profile roast, almost to a standard profile that we’ve developed.

At times we’ll use the sample roaster to experiment with small adjustments on the profile. The results are pretty consistent, which is what you want when sampling; either the same coffee or comparing across different types of coffees, so that you can be sure any flavour differences are not due to factors on the equipment.”

Below is a standard profile Hatch have developed for sample roasting Colombian beans. The graph on left shows temperature in degrees Centigrade, and on the right Fahrenheit.