Coffee, understood scientifically.

SORAMAME LAB INC takes the many things that happen in coffee, looks at them scientifically, and turns what it finds into something you can use.

Roasting is physics and chemistry

Roasting has long been a craft of experience and intuition, for a simple reason: there was no way to find out what was actually happening inside the drum.

But roasting is heat transfer, which is physics, and changes inside the bean, which are chemistry. If that is what it is, then it can be observed, recorded and verified. That is where we stand.

How we work

What matters to us is an empirical stance: forming a hypothesis, then testing it against observation, experiment and data until the mechanism behind it is clear.

And then, standing on that understanding, expressing something as a coffee person. We think that is how it ought to go.

What we build is the groundwork and the tools that let a coffee person realise what they are reaching for.

Our first product: COFFEE HAZEL

A system that detects first crack automatically by sensing steam. Three years of testing went into it before we put it into production.

Our shop and checkout are in Japanese, and we currently ship within Japan only.
The Artisan settings file is free for anyone to download.

What comes next

A second and a third product are in testing. We will keep turning ideas that come from a scientific view of coffee into things that work.

From Kawasaki, Miyagi, to the world

We work from a depopulating village in the hills of Miyagi, in northern Japan, with our eyes on the world beyond it. We would like the children here to see that a life can reach that far, and we would like this place to have some life in it.

Day to day

We post what we are testing and building on Instagram — the things that work and the things that do not.