The most awarded coffee roaster. Kelvin lets you custom roast fresh beans, explore new flavors, save money, and reduce waste.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
A little help from our friends...
over 6 years ago
– Fri, May 04, 2018 at 05:38:58 AM
Hello Coffee Lovers,
We continue to be blown away by the support of our backers around the world, now over 1,300 strong. We have about a 50/50 mix of US and International backers, but 100% of you are excited about diving into the world of home coffee roasting. We’re thrilled for you to experience the many benefits of roasting your own coffee with Kelvin and wanted to introduce you to a friend and collaborator that has helped us move toward that goal.
One part chef, one part coffee guru...
When we were in the early stages of the development of Kelvin, we had the good fortune of getting to know Chad Little, co-owner of Chicago’s Arbor restaurant. At Arbor, Chad has a passion for fresh ingredients and exploration. Check out the article below to learn more about Chad, Arbor and to get a glimpse of the passion that we immediately recognized:
Our first conversation with Chad lasted several hours and we’ve spent many hours with him since, discussing our goals for Kelvin and sharing our prototypes with him. Chad has roasted some amazing coffees with our roasting prototype and given us great feedback that is being incorporated into our production designs. We wanted to share a quick clip from a visit we had with Chad to discuss his experiences with our prototype prior to launching our campaign.
We’ve also been working with Chad and some other fantastic colleagues on the green bean side - a key element to the Kelvin experience. We’ll be sharing more details on the green beans and some new prototype footage in upcoming updates...stay tuned!
Best,
- Team Kelvin
The Latest on Kelvin Development
over 6 years ago
– Sat, Apr 14, 2018 at 07:31:23 PM
Hello Coffee Lovers,
First off, thank you for your compelling questions and for your patience as we worked on this detailed update to provide a bunch of answers to your questions! And second, THANK YOU to the 1,000+ backers from around the world who have supported our goal of bringing Kelvin to production to help make home coffee roasting accessible to all.
Let’s talk about prototypes…
On the road to manufacturing for Kelvin over the last couple years, we have created many prototypes. We started with very simple form explorations using paper and plastic before moving on to more technical functional prototypes. For nostalgia's sake, here are a couple of pictures showing our very early form exploration and roasting prototypes:
Early Kelvin form explorations in our engineering prototype workshop - we explored dozens of different options before finalizing on the current design
Very early roasting prototype - that high-temp oil lamp glass will be familiar to many home roasters out there!
The prototyping process is very important both for proving out design and engineering concepts, and for dialing in the experience of using the product. Specifically, we have been leveraging two main types of functional prototypes, as shown below:
Two types of prototypes - each with a unique purpose to help us arrive at our final design
Why are we using these two different approaches to prototyping? Simple - as professional designers and engineers, we knew it was best split the development into two tracks so we could be the most efficient with our efforts and funds prior to our Kickstarter campaign. Things like injection molded plastic parts and custom glass pieces require expensive tooling and large minimum order quantities to create, so we leveraged technologies like 3D printing and CNC machining of plastics to evolve our interaction prototypes. 3D printed parts can’t survive the temperatures required for coffee roasting, so that’s why we leveraged more simply fabricated glass and CNC machined aluminum metal components for our roasting prototypes.
We’re now bringing together the learnings from both types of prototypes to create our production product, which will be an optimized version of our interaction prototype with engineering grade materials, with our manufacturing partners.
Will it roast?
Yes. It does. Kelvin roasts from raw green beans to any desired roast level - from light city to full french roast. Our engineering development work has involved many cycles of roast testing as we’ve worked to improve things like air flow, chaff removal, etc. to get the best roast possible from our product. See below for an example roasting video utilizing one of our roasting prototypes. At the request of the community, this video is presented in all its awkward and uncut glory to provide an unfiltered view of one of our test roasts taken from raw green beans to a nice dark roast (around 10 mins + cooling):
Man it smells great in the office today….
Is this roasting prototype perfect?
Nope. But that’s why you build prototypes! Based on our learnings from our roast prototypes, we’ve already been working with our manufacturer to update the design with details like increasing the specification for fan speed with new motor and fan components as well as a re-designed roast chamber inlet to get even more agitation and airflow on the beans throughout the roast to improve the efficiency with our maximum roast capacity of 120 grams.
We’ve shared these prototypes with many coffee industry experts - some even took them home to roast with first-hand. They made some amazing coffee and provided great feedback that is also being incorporated into our production design. We also recently held a demo day in New York, where we made pour overs from a few varieties of beans roasted from our roasting prototypes for some coffee fans and journalists. The response to our coffee was universally positive and gave us even more confidence that we’re on the right track with a product design that simply roasts great coffee.
Designing for everyone
A few of our backers are experienced home roasters and they have inquired about advanced functionality for Kelvin, such as fully customizable roast curves and other features often found in $1,000+ roasters. For those of you who are not home roasters: customizable roast curves enable users to customize and control the heat, fan and cooling independently, throughout the course of the roast to achieve a specific “rate of rise” (or "RoR" in coffee geek speak). While this enables supreme control over the roast, it requires extensive knowledge and experimentation to optimize. It also complicates the product with additional sensors and more complex software that adds cost and introduces additional safety testing requirements. By simply controlling the roast time, Kelvin removes much of this complexity, keeps the cost down, and still allows you to achieve a wide range of roasts to explore different coffee flavor profiles.
Our goal has always been to create a simple and intuitive product that would allow anyone to get into home roasting. While we appreciate the value these advanced functions may provide to experienced, discerning home roasters, we want to keep Kelvin simple and accessible for all. If you’re looking for a more feature-rich roaster, we recommend checking out the beautiful Ikawa roaster (a previous Kickstarter project), which currently retails for £1,270 (~$1,756US).
Next steps…
Now that we’ve met our goal, we’re getting a jump on our production schedule, even before the campaign ends. Stay tuned for more updates as we get future product samples from our manufacturer - we’ll be sharing along the journey with our community of backers every step of the way!
Best,
- Team Kelvin
Friday Evening Update!
over 6 years ago
– Wed, Apr 04, 2018 at 05:24:23 PM
We're approaching 900 backers- Very exciting for all of us here at IA!
We received some questions about our prototyping. This is our area of expertise and passion! We are a product design and engineering company, so throughout the process we made a series of functional prototypes and iterated them with expert home roasters. We used the findings from each prototype to iterate and make improvements on the next. That’s essential to the product development process. It should be noted that Kickstarter requires large hardware projects have evidence of functional prototypes. In fact, Zach Dunham from Kickstarter was at our office, experienced our prototype and saw the results.
We have taken the learnings from all our prototypes and rolled those into our production version, which is currently in advanced design phases with our manufacturing partner.
We also have some exciting video updates in the works from one of our expert home roasting partners and our session with Zach. Stay tuned!
-Team Kelvin
Thank you!
over 6 years ago
– Wed, Apr 04, 2018 at 05:24:15 PM
Hey backers,
Wow, we did it!
Not only did we reach our funding goal in 3 hours, but we’re now 227% funded!
It’s incredible to see all the support pour in from our very first day. We can’t thank you enough for coming along on this journey with us—we’ve been working on this project for over a year, and it’s so great to see it come to fruition so quickly.
Make sure you keep sharing our project with every coffee lover in your life!
