Seems Ikawa just announced their new home roaster with a 100g capacity.

https://us.ikawahome.com/products/ikawa ... pp-section

Capacity
100g (3.5 oz) green coffee.
Designed for back-to-back roasting.

Mains Supply
110-120V, 220-240V or 220-240V SWISS as required.
Please select the appropriate voltage when adding to cart.

Power
1700W max

Dimensions

240x130x350mm
(9.5x5.2x14 in)
Weight
5kg (11lbs)

Noteable Design Features
Custom-excluded Aluminium Uni-body in White
Precision-cut Top Glass
Double-walled Collection Jar
Premium Cork Grips
Air Inlet Filter
Chamber Louvre Vents
Cyclone Collector


In the box

1 x IKAWA Home Roaster
1 x Doser
1 x IKAWA Coffee Starter Kit
3 x Collection Jars
1 x Power Lead (UK/EU/US)
1 x White linen bag
1 x Welcome letter
1 x User manual

Wireless Connectivity

Bluetooth 5.0


Controls

1x 'Go' button with LED
1x Rear power button
Home App available on iOS and Android

I notice they don't mention the temp sensors (the old Home had one while the pro had 2). Also concerning is this quote:

The new app will only be available on iOS at release - the Android app will be updated at a later date. The current Android app will still be available for use. All-new editor includes up to 30 preference combinations. Coffee information, recipes, specification, story, images, producers and processes are included with all IKAWA green coffee beans, added to the new coffee library via a QR code. Access to the premium-feature advanced roast curve editor is free for all customers who purchased the Roaster before 12 October 2021. Customers after this date will have to pay a monthly fee to access this feature - more details will follow. The complimentary green coffee starter kit will automatically be added to your cart at checkout.

Referencing some sort of monthly subscription to unlock all the features. Was heavily considering this until I read that - not for a $1000 machine.

''Access to the premium-feature advanced roast curve editor is free for all customers who purchased the Roaster before 12 October 2021. Customers after this date will have to pay a monthly fee to access this feature - more details will follow''

Does this sentence imply that owners of the previous version of the IKAWA Home will be able to get this app function for free or it refers only to the new 100gr owners??

So, I'm confused. If I ordered it before it was available to order, I get the app for free? Is there something I'm missing?

Ira

It looks like this may have been updated, as it now says:

*The new home app is currently in beta, visuals may vary at release. The new app will only be available on iOS at release - the Android app will be updated at a later date. The current Android app will still be available for use. All-new editor is free for all new and existing users. It includes up to 30 preference combinations. Coffee information, recipes, specification, story, images, producers and processes are included with all IKAWA green coffee beans, added to the new coffee library via a QR code. The premium-feature advanced roast curve editor is free for all customers who purchased the Roaster before 31 October 2021. Customers after this date will have to pay a monthly fee (£29.99/m) to access this feature - more details will follow. The complimentary green coffee starter kit will automatically be added to your cart at checkout.

Means you've got 15 days to decide or the price basically doubles or triples. Wow!

Ira

Sounds like a paperweight without the app and they're going to charge for the app?
I wonder who came up with that pricing strategy and if they'll still have a job in January.

I don't know how this can compete with the Kaffelogic Nano 7 (unless I'm missing something obvious)

I think we need more details before concluding that this new product is a paperweight. Specifically, when they say "premium-feature advanced roast curve editor", which is only available by subscription, do they mean the ability to edit the inlet temperature and fan speed curves, or do they mean the new Roast Degree and Development Time controls?

If included in the free app, the new roast controls could be a game-changer for home roasters who don't have the desire and/or skills to create or edit roast profiles. They're similar to how I manage roasts on my Ikawa Pro V3. I pick a profile and experiment with different DTs to produce the color and level of development I want (i.e., I pick a profile with a longer time between 1C and end than I expect to need, then drop the roast when DT gets to the target I've selected.) The simple buttons shown in the app prototype appear to do something similar.

That said, I'm not clear on how the magic is achieved. First, the app must allow you to mark 1C, which AFAIK isn't possible in the current Home app. Second, the profile editor must be more complex than even the Pro app editor because it has to take into account multiple possible roast levels and development times. Third, each profile must apply to a specific bean, probably sold by Ikawa, where they've tested, measured and tasted different roast level and development time combinations.

This leads me to speculate that the marketing strategy for the 100g Home roaster is to tie each profile to a specific coffee sold by Ikawa or other greens vendors. Actually, that's probably been the strategy for the Home all along. If this is still true for the 100g Home, greens vendors are the target subscribers for the profile editing capability, not end-users, and the subscription price won't be a problem for them.

I think the Home has always been intended for people who really aren't interested in developing profiles. They just want to push a button and roast the coffee, happy to leave the often complicated and tedious task of dialing-in roasts and editing profiles to someone with roasting expertise. Assuming the Roast Degree ad Development Time controls are included in the free app, end users will have the ability to easily try different roast levels and DTs for a given coffee they got from the greens vendor / profile creator. I think there are many potential home roasters out there who will be delighted with that -- i.e., "I can roast the bean to my particular taste without learning how to create and edit roast profiles."

Of course, the downside is that the end user is locked into buying coffee from Ikawa or greens vendors who provide full-featured 100g Home profiles for their beans. For the strategy to truly succeed, Ikawa has to market more aggressively to roasters who serve the Home market. That'll be a chicken-and-egg effort, to be sure.

One thing to bear in mind is that Ikawa must avoid cannibalizing its Pro market or really p*ssing-off it's current Pro customers (like me), who paid 4x-5x the 100g Home price for their machines. Leaving out the all-important exhaust temperature probe and including the profile editor in the free app are the two ways they're doing that. It would have been a harder decision for me between the new 100g Home and my Pro V3, but in the end I probably would have opted for the combination of exhaust temperature monitoring and ability to edit profiles without paying a monthly subscription fee.

The premium-feature advanced roast curve editor is free for all customers who purchased the Roaster before 31 October 2021. Customers after this date will have to pay a monthly fee (£29.99/m) to access this feature - more details will follow.

Do I have this right?

You're telling me I pay you $1000 for a roaster - and then in order to access the advanced roast curve editor I have to pay an additional $480 a year for as long as I own the machine....

Yeah, no thanks. That business model doesn't sit right with me.

Another way to think about it - the three year cost of ownership is the same as an Aillio Bullet. Also, what happens if IKAWA goes out of business and stops supporting the app? Am I left with a $1000 brick on my counter?

The New Ikawa looks like an very nice fluid bed roaster with the ability to precisely control roast profiles and perhaps even allow indoor roasting without too much exhaust odors. The mainlimitation for me is its 100g roast limit, even if as the literature claims it is good for back-to-back roasts. I'd probably buy one if it were less expensive, or pay a bit more for it if it could handle batches of 200g or more.

Other than the batch size, it appears to be an extremely capable compact hot air roaster, on paper the most capable I've seen so far.

TigerStripes wrote:You're telling me I pay you $1000 for a roaster - and then in order to access the advanced roast curve editor I have to pay an additional $480 a year for as long as I own the machine..

Unless you buy it before the end of the month, then the advanced editor is free. Or that's what it seems to say.

Ira