sample roasters
app-controlled sample roasters used across the green-coffee trade.
london, ukfounded 2010visit ikawa
IKAWA builds fluid bed sample roasters for quality control, green buying, and roast development. founded in 2010 and based in london, they introduced the first fully digital sample roaster with app-based control and profile sharing. the machines are built around simplicity: all-metal construction with a single moving part (the fan), which keeps maintenance minimal and reliability high. batch sizes are fixed at either 50g or 100g depending on model. the fluid bed system uses hot air rather than a drum, giving fast roast times and consistent heat distribution. IKAWA machines are designed for portability, shipping with pelican cases and built to handle 60+ roasts per day in the field or lab. the app interface means you can roast from preset profiles or build custom curves without prior roasting experience, then share those profiles across multiple machines. they're primarily used by importers, roasteries doing sample evaluation, and coffee-producing regions where buyers need to assess lots at origin. not a production roaster, not for someone wanting to roast a few hundred grams at home. this is a tool for repetitive, precise sample work.
you can run preset profiles immediately without understanding roasting fundamentals, which gets you consistent results for basic sample evaluation. building and editing custom profiles requires more knowledge since you're manipulating time and temperature curves directly through the app. the interface shows bean and exhaust temp in real time, and you can share profiles between machines, which is useful if you're standardizing across multiple buying offices or lab stations. the fixed batch size removes one variable, so dialing in a new origin is faster than on manual sample roasters.
fluid bed roasts faster and more evenly since every bean is suspended in hot air rather than tumbling against a hot surface. you get cleaner flavor separation, which is what you want when evaluating green coffee. the trade-off is that fluid bed doesn't replicate the thermal dynamics of a production drum roaster, so your sample roast won't taste identical to what comes off a probat or loring. for green buying and defect screening that's fine. for dialing in a production roast profile, the difference matters more.
the 50g sample pro v3 matches standard cupping protocols (typically 8.25g dose per cup, so 50g yields about six cups) and is lighter for travel. the 100g pro 100 gives you more roasted coffee per batch, which is useful if you're doing larger cuppings, sending samples to multiple people, or want backup for re-cupping. both machines are the same footprint and construction, just different chamber height. if you're mostly evaluating at origin or doing single-table cuppings, the 50g is sufficient. larger labs or import offices often prefer the 100g.
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