COFFEE+ROAST=RECIPE
We call all of the ways that you can roast coffee that are stored within your IKAWA Home app, ‘roast recipes’. Roasting with the IKAWA Home system is like making a dish from a cookbook-you are taking a green coffee and adding another ingredient: your time and your choice of roasting program from the app.
There are essentially three types of roast recipes and editing available to use within the IKAWA Home app, depending on the time and energy that you want to use in discovery and your knowledge of roasting coffee at home.They are IKAWA recommended, Guided Edit and Graph Editor/Legacy roast recipes.
With every IKAWA or non-IKAWA coffee that is added into your app, there are recommended roast recipes. We recommend that if you have no experience at all with roasting, that you begin with using the recommended roast recipe. It is like having the barriers up when you go bowling, helping you get success right away.
We wanted to create a way for IKAWA Home users to be able to take control and roast a coffee to their specific tastes. Beginning to edit from the recommended roast recipes is referred to as ‘Guided Edit’. Once you have mastered the use of the recommended roast recipes, there are over 500 Guided edit roast recipes available to use within the app, nested under each IKAWA coffee. Using Guided Edit to roast, continuing the bowling analogy, gives you freedom to control the path of the bowling ball, but within an area where you are still guaranteed great results.
Allowing the IKAWA Home app to be your guide in editing your roast recipes is the best place to begin with the IKAWA Home roasting system, even if you have experience with roasting coffee at home. Each roast recipe that is nested under a coffee has flavour and roast stage expectations, as well as a description of the roast recipe and why it looks the way it does. Utilising and reading this information within the guided edit roast recipes will set you up for success in learning how a guided edit roast recipe will yield a certain roast colour and flavour expectations.You can learn more about roast colour and flavour expectations in this blog.
IKAWA Home's mission is to make home roasting commonplace, allowing coffee to be sourced from producers and supplied directly to consumers without the need for additional processing; we want everyone to be able to learn and have a positive experience in participating in the coffee supply chain. This is a big reason for why there is so much information in the guided edit roast recipes. You have the option of simply selecting the roast recipe based on the brew method and roast colour i.e. Espresso Medium-Dark +++, or you can choose to learn about the coffee, the producer of the coffee, and why that particular roast recipe will produce a roasted coffee that is best suited for the chosen brew method and why it will have that roast colour.
Part of the reason why we developed the Guided Edit roast recipes is because for many, the inlet temperature graph of our previous app versions did not provide a clear outcome for our customers. We had received overwhelming feedback from users through our customer support and research, that they found the inlet graph of our older Home App frustrating and difficult to understand. Our solution was to create the Guided Edit feature, which so many IKAWA Home users have found helpful and informative.
The inlet graph from our previous Home App versions is still available for use within the app for a monthly subscription fee. We kept this feature in the Home 3.0 app, as a lot of our 50g roaster customers had become comfortable with the graph after practising their skills. We also wanted to offer a route for users to explore roasting in more detail as they become more comfortable with using guided edit roast recipes to get their desired results. The IKAWA Home users who are utilising the graph editor are ready to try to create their own roast recipes from scratch, with a better understanding than ever before about what effect their own recipes and data points on the graph would have on their finished roast.
Using the Inlet temperature graph that is in the graph editor subscription is like bowling without barriers. Without practice you could end up in the gutter, but over time you can control all the variables to get the outcomes that you like.
The IKAWA Home app is free to download and use. We highly recommend downloading the app prior to purchase to have a look around at the different coffees available to add to your coffee library and all of the roast recipes that are nested in those coffees. You can read more about our App in this previous blog.