Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

#introduction

I'm part owner and roaster at a little coffee company in Wisconsin. Author of Typica, a popular free program used to capture and work with coffee roasting production records that's used at roasting companies all over the world. Volunteer on the Roasters Guild education committee. Available for paid coffee consulting, training, open source software development. Living with a cat who broke into my house and decided to stay. Likes: cute, travel, food. Dislikes: blinking lights.

why the hell am I watching the debate?

Looks like Miku Expo has given up on being a thing so I'm just getting my money back. Miku says stay home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e29aYbcF6_A

The cat says it's time to pet the cat.

Here's my completely off the wall presidential debate prediction: in an effort to appeal to younger voters and the parents of future younger voters, Biden will try to work in a quote from a musical number in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Trump will fail to catch the reference.

Batch #2 of the limited edition coffee has also mostly sold. It looks like I might need to roast batch #3 tomorrow. I'm working on a write up of how I approached roasting that coffee, but unless I stop getting distracted and am able to slam out the words the coffee might sell out before I can publish that.

Signed up for a food manager license class/test since my old license is expired. I have employees who have the same license so it's not a problem that mine isn't current, but I'd rather not have to rush on that in the unlikely event that everybody just quit on me or something.

Batch #2 matched up perfectly with the first batch. That empties out my first 10Kg box of green coffee (the empty box is now part of the product display). I have one full box left which I'll similarly split into a couple production batches in part because I'm not expecting the coffee to continue selling at the pace the first batch went and in part because my production roaster can't do the profile I chose for this with a large batch size.

All but 1 pound of the first batch of my competition coffee sold by the time I got to the shop today. Will need to roast another batch today. https://wilsonscoffee.com/products/auramatina.html

Sad table is sad.

New coffee is up for sale on the web site. People are already buying it in the shop, too. https://wilsonscoffee.com/products/auramatina.html

Limited edition coffee is now out for sale in the shop. I've reserved a few small bags to send as gifts. Next task is getting it up on the web site where it hopefully doesn't sell too quickly (I'll need to take it down before I sell more than I have).

Half pound labels done. Those look very similar and I was able to keep the top block of text exactly the same. I was hoping for that as I rather like how the top of the ff ligature snugs in with the curve at the bottom of the E above it.

All of my coffee labels are made in XeLaTeX, mainly because I despise dragging boxes around on screen to get things to go where I want.

I still need to do the half pound design (less width to work with on those bags), but here's the label design for the pound bag size.

Today's UCE has a factory (I'm guessing in China) that wants to sell me coffee related pins. This was my favorite design of the set. More relevant to my interests than the vast majority of my spam.

Assuming I don't wreck any of the batches, I'll end up with 30 pounds of roasted coffee and that's going to have to sell for $26 per pound (I should really be selling it for $32, but I don't think my customers will pay that much for this).

As the coffee cools, the juicy sweetness becomes more prominent in the cup. Nicely balanced, still getting that nice apple note. I think I would have had a good shot at winning the competition with this (I was hoping for third place).

Tasting the coffee and, yeah, it's very nice. It tastes absolutely nothing like what I normally do with Brazilian coffees (I could have replicated that flavor profile, but given what I'll have to charge for this, what's the point of that?) It reminds me of the coffee in Ethiopia after you dip some /Ruta chalepensis/ in it, though not roasted anywhere near as dark. For those who haven't had that, it's sort of apple-like.

The first drip pot of my competition coffee is now brewing. It smelled great when grinding, at least as best I could tell through the mask. I'll be tasting it in private properly distanced from others soon. If it's good, getting that out for sale is my top priority for today.