The Royal Blog

The long and winding road of Ikawa profiling led me to pen previous articles on challenges and some new ‘from-scratch” sample roast profiles I have been employing regularly for Crown Jewels and other coffees. Yet, I’ve long been seeking a low-airflow alternative to the high fan speeds I tend to prefer for most high-density coffees. […]

By Nate Lumpkin, Crown Barista Since we’ve all been stuck at home for months, it seemed like there was no better time than now to practice roasting my own coffee. I do most of my home cooking on a cast iron skillet that a friend gifted me many years ago, and I’d heard that it’s […]

The previous installment in this series outlined some challenges that presented themselves while using our Ikawa roasters here at Royal and The Crown. Below, we’ll look at the journey of creating roast profiles and making adjustments to suit many different purposes. After getting our machines back from their most recent round of servicing, I needed […]

Flashback to April 2017, SCA Expo in Seattle. (For context, The Crown — the building — is still nearly 2 years from completion.) At Expo, one of the buzzworthy booths was a funny-looking small-batch electric roaster called Ikawa. You’ve surely heard of them by now, the Bluetooth-enabled device that roasts 50g of coffee with customizable […]

Roasting on the Quest M3s: An Update A year down the road, and we are still roasting on the Quest M3s roaster, now set up here at The Crown in our roasting lab. We’ve had classes for our baristas and the public to learn to roast on this machine, and we’ve released more than 50 […]

Roasting coffee influences flavor, but it is not the final step in the process. Unless you are roasting your own competition coffee, roasting for a barista or brewer competitor is a similar process to roasting for any other customer. Once a competitor chooses a coffee, they will need the roasted coffee to consistently produce the […]

Over the past year, one component of our weekly Crown Analysis writings has gained attention with a demographic we weren’t used to hearing from home roasters. This welcome attention isn’t something we take lightly, and we want to thank all of you who have gotten in contact with us. The Behmor is one of the […]

Editor’s Note: The notes & profiles below were created using the Pro App prior to version 2.5 and Firmware prior to version 23, which introduced a new type of airflow control. You’ll get the best results below when using “Closed Loop” setting on your Ikawa Pro. We’ll be updating our profiles soon, stay tuned. We’ve […]

Hang up your hats and tie up those high horses, the great caffeine debate can be put to rest. All roasts are created equal. That’s right. Under normal circumstances an 8oz cup of light roast has about the same amount of caffeine as the same serving of dark roast. Ready to dive down the rabbit […]

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in Daily Coffee News on November 22, 2017. In what might be a foolhardy attempt to correlate two of coffee’s most complicated concepts, I’ve dedicated a significant portion of the past few months to examining the relationship between the water activity of green coffee and the Maillard reaction during […]