On the first day of our roadtrip down the Izu Peninsula, we stopped by a local coffee roaster called ITOKU COFFEE. I’m amazed by wherever I go in Japan, there seems to be a coffee roaster somewhere nearby (isn’t it great).
They have a range of beans available, including both single origin and their blend beans. The main display at the front of the shop stocks medium to dark roast beans (from left to right). These are at a fairly reasonable price point - around 1600 - 2000 yen for 200g.
They also do stock a couple of light roast beans, and they have a separate display on the right-hand side for that. These range from 1500 yen - 4000 yen for 100g.
What’s cool about ITOKU is that they offer a discount on their medium and dark roast beans if you want to try a couple of different varieties.
In our case - we picked up 3x 100g of their specialty beans for 2160 yen (without the discount, this would have been 2786 yen - super good value!):
- Colombia La Palmera (Medium)
- El Salvador Loma La Gloria (Medium-dark)
- Kenya Coffinaf AA (Medium-dark)
Note the roast levels are not listed in the shop display itself, but I found it afterwards by looking on their website.
We drank these beans at 12 clicks on our Timemore C2 grinder. For the Kenya, since it is quite a dark roast we dropped the temps as low as 75℃. The El Salvador was best at 80℃, and we enjoyed the Colombia bean at around 90℃.
I’ve talked previously about how Japanese roast levels can be a bit inconsistent (where what they might label as “medium” actually tastes more like a “medium-dark”). And I did feel that Itoku’s medium roast bean was on the darker end of things. Handily I did have some of Koffee Mameya’s medium roast Kenya bean left over, and this did taste lighter in comparison.
They also sell pour over with a couple of beans on offer at different roasts. I was quite tempted by their Colombian lychee light roast bean, but unfortunately it was well after noon when we arrived here and we knew we would be having an early night as we were camping so we didn’t want the caffeine to interfere with that!
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