IKAWA Home

Very hard to handle since the update, drops login and take forever to log back in. Editing profiles became harder. I hate using the machince since.

The reviewer who wrote that a subscription is needed to customise recipes must have misunderstood. That is for more technical levels of customisation than I would imagine a home roaster needing. There are several options with the basic app, such as degrees of darkness and speed of roasting and with explanations of how the settings would impact the bean. It works better on my iPad, but my iPhone is on a beta iOS version.

Was tempted to buy a roaster, but it’s mad to ask for extra money (monthly!) for a possibility to create your own roasting profile. That sorted my dilemma- definitely not buying, thank you very much.

The app is great but please please make the resolution native for IPhone X+ , as well as public depository for roast profiles , forum is great and all that but it can be difficult looking for a profile to suit your needs!

I like my machine but my biggest problem is the lack of customization. For something I paid almost $1300 you think I could make a custom roast without paying for a subscription. Simple money grab and it’s my biggest disappointment. While I’ll still use my IKAWA home roaster I recommend alternatives to others who ask me for this simple reason.

I had the Ikawa Home Roaster pulled up and was ready to buy it. Thankfully I decided to check the app out before making such a big purchase. There are “recipes” for Ikawa’s coffees, so you’ll be fine as long as you buy from them. But this is the world’s most expensive razor blade handle for those razor blades, and even if their coffee is fairly priced and very good, I would never buy a roaster to be locked in to one store. How easy is it to roast your own coffee? Turns out that you need to pay a monthly subscription to have access. Looking for confirmation? Go to Ikawa’s “Creating your own roast recipes using Graph Editor” blog post. Right now is it at least $34 a month for that subscription, but with all subscriptions, they can raise that price and you have no option to go elsewhere. I went digging for how people are dealing with that. Some posts were from people who had sold their machine. It was great for Ikawa, but they couldn’t replicate great results for other beans using the existing profiles. Some posts were for people who would manually stop the roast a certain period of time after the first crack, removing the benefits of automation this roaster provides. I can’t support a roaster that I don’t own the hardware and software I need to use it, so I’m really glad I didn’t make the mistake of buying this one. I wish Ikawa was more upfront about the cost and need for the subscription. I’m glad I hesitated. This roaster could have been such a cool offering.

I bought the Ikawa Pro way back from the SCAA in Seattle 2014(?). Enjoyed using it to have more repeatable sample roasts over my 2 barrel Probat. Fast forward 9 years and I’m no longer in the coffee industry but I still love coffee. So, i ended up buying the Ikawa Home Roaster Black Friday 2022. At the time, I didn’t realize that you couldn’t tweak the roasts the way I wanted to without paying the monthly fee. That’s really the only thing stopping me from giving it 5 stars. I’m not experiencing any of the problems other reviewers have had. And, i am paying for the subscription to customize roasts. Hope this review helps

This app Hass to be the most difficult to use, terrible interface, nothing works properly app I’ve ever used. It’s bizarre that you can charge $1300 for great device to roast coffee and spend absolutely no time effort or resources to make the app work properly. I am within the 30 day window to return the roaster and I might have to do that because I am way too frustrated to keep using this application.

Doesn’t work

This app works great as long as you don’t log in and use it. Once you do that, it will crash and you can only roast whatever was the last profile you used. The Bluetooth also takes forever to link to the app which is probably unrelated. On a positive note, the machine itself works and have never had any issues so as long as you roast 1 type of bean for 1 profile it’s the best £1200 you could ever spend.