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.

While starting with sample roasting does mean that messed up batches waste less coffee, those sample roasts should be getting used in service of high impact purchasing decisions, so mistakes can be a lot more costly unless you're just drilling on things you don't intend use (in which case 100% of the coffee is waste instead of being able to sell the successful batches).

The main problems with starting on sample roasting are down to differences in why you're roasting which impact you roasting needs to be approached and (to an increasingly lesser extent for new installations) substantially worse instrumentation on smaller machines. It means you end up with no experience dealing with 2nd crack at all and learn a lot less on earlier parts of the roast since you're really trying to do everything the same, often without the tools that make this easier.

New roaster training continues today. He's got decent instincts so it's mostly about gaining the experience with different roasting situations and how to approach them and that's happening through doing production roasts. I've never been a fan of the approach of starting new people on sample roasters.

Despite the large difference in flavor profile, I decided that I didn't need to change any of the blend recipes that use the new coffee. Existing recipes were still delicious with the substitution.

New Papua New Guinea is now up for sale on the web site. It should be hitting the shelf locally later today or tomorrow (I need to change the label as the flavor profile is very different from the previous lot). My idea of roasting the coffee faster based on what I was tasting yesterday worked out very well so now I have an Ethiopian coffee that tastes more like a Brazilian coffee and a Papua New Guinea coffee that tastes more like an Ethiopian coffee.

Started training another employee who has expressed interest in doing some coffee roasting. With the wholesale/online business picking up lately it'll be good to have more people who know how to do that so I can start taking vacations again.

The coffee is a natural from Papua New Guinea. Very fruity (blueberry) aroma, not so much in the flavor. I'm going to try roasting it faster to see if I can bring a bit more of that into the cup.

Coffee smells good.

Today's programming has been a continuation of work on the interface for entering green coffee purchase data. This is completely redesigned compared with 1.x and uses a lot less screen space (meaning there's now lots of room for more features). The old UI was a common area of confusion so I'm hoping people find the new one easier to use successfully.

Air conditioning is back on at work. I'm multi-tasking making more chai concentrate with writing software. Later I'll need to fire up the coffee roasters to catch up on production.

The furnace needs a part to get the AC to run properly so I'll be switching over to night roasting until that's fixed. That's going to cause production delays for a few customers.

Work also had power disruptions, but that wasn't too bad. Coffee roaster was mostly cooled off with nothing in the roasting chamber. I was trying to use a scale that really doesn't like unexpected power outages and power kept going out briefly before the scale recovered from the previous outage.

There's weather happening. Power company says my house doesn't have power so I'll have to decide if I want to try to find some take out or if I'm going to risk dinner being saltines and cheesecake. Maybe they'll let me know that power is on before I'm done with work and I can just cook a proper dinner.

Today someone at the company that sells my shop various kinds of insurance learned that it's normal for mail servers to limit message sizes and that there's significant overhead in encoding for attachments. One of the files was probably just barely over the limit and I'm not changing my email server configuration, but I could give her a link to upload to our Nextcloud server and she was fine with doing that instead of spending several dollars on printing and postage.

Scrapped most of the code I wrote yesterday and replaced it with something a lot simpler.

I'm reminded of an exchange I had with a company that was doing the whole your data lives in our cloud and that lets you share it and I'm over here like most of the time I don't want to share that, but when I do it's called a file and I can attach it to an email or stick it on shared storage or put it on a thumb stick and hand it to someone or make it available on my own web site or... Plus I can use it when your company fails or my Internet is down or there's a DDOS. Files are great. Use them.

Had a small detour for technical support. A growing category of issues that I'm seeing people get frustrated by fundamentally boils down to people not knowing where their files are (because the apps they're using make it too hard to know that). As soon as the file is found outside of the app that hid it, the thing they need to do becomes trivial.

Didn't have time to finish up the next bit of coding but I left myself some notes on where I left off and what's left to do. Maybe I'll pick it up again after dinner.

Removed a few coffees from the web site. I still have it to sell from the shelves locally but I can't roast any more until new coffees get into the country.

Spent more on groceries today than planned, but that's just because I stocked up on stuff with good sale prices. I'll have to remember to eat more yogurt to get through all of that while it's still good.