IKAWA Home

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.

I am unable to do my very first roast upon receiving the new IKAWA home because the roaster is defaulting to a coffee and roast level I do not desire. The first attempt to edit it to a Light roast kept re-triggering back to Medium. I deleted the app and re-installed it. I then was able to edit the existing Medium template to Light, but it will not save. The loading wheel continues for 10-15 minutes, and restarting the app has not solved the issue. Ready to return this because after being so excited to get this product, it is rendered useless by an app that cannot support the roaster. Perhaps the IKAWA Pro app is better, but from my understanding, it doesn’t not work with the IKAWA Home roaster. What a shame.

I can’t add IKAWA coffee recipe and my own coffee recipe

So you wanted an Ikawa roaster, well they have changed their business model for hobby users. If you want to build your own roast profile like you’ve been able to go since the roaster was first released, you will now have to pay $33 per month. Talk about bait and switch. I suspect they are trying to deter professionals from using the home version which is a quarter of the cost of the pro roaster, by crippling the software. In addition, the software is extremely buggy. There is no response from their developers. The in app reporting system dumps the logs into the ether, you find even get a confirmation email, and no one responds. Except for the sales department, they are happy to take your call. I wanted to like this company, their tag line is “here for you”, should be more like “here for your money”. Be critical with who you choose to do business with, it matters. Update: 5/12/2022 it took Ikawa 6 months to fix the temperature for each node not displaying because it was cut off of the left side. I like how they call this an “improvement” in the update log.

This app is good when it decides it wants to work. But that’s rare. Paying the high price of this machine and not even being able to roast coffee creates an awful experience. Each time I purchase a new bag, the app will not let me send the new roast to the machine. It takes an hour or two of reinstalling the app, turning the machine back on and off.. it’s a nightmare. Extremely buggy and has difficulty performing a simple function, sending a coffee roast to the machine! I’m ready to return my machine.