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.

Strongly tempted to replace the data acquisition hardware on my roasters to all stuff that works with Linux. Just spent entirely too much time fighting with Windows (an update messed up my login settings because surely I didn't really want the local account that I explicitly went out of my way to create in the first place) instead of getting my work done.

I guess it's bill paying day. Water, property tax, mortgage, car stuff, electric, domain names, &c.

It's been a long time since I've been there. Looking forward to some good creole food.

Looks like I'm going to be teaching my next class at an event in New Orleans at the start of October. Planning to just drive down for that.

I think today's online class went well. Lots of good questions from students (most of whom did not turn in their homework but it's fine, they're not getting a grade from me). Oddly, the cat stayed out of the way. She usually likes to be my co-instructor.

25 years ago, Captain Janeway murdered Tuvix and Voyager was a worse show for it.

For this session, I decided to go with one coffee taken to 3 different ending temperatures, and for each of those ending temperatures, adjusting the roasting plan so there are three different ways of getting to each of those. 9 roasted coffees total. The ones that are roasted to the same end temperature are closer to each other than to the other groups, but there are more subtle differences within each group as well.

Tasted the class coffees today. I believe they work for the educational objectives.

Various tea infusers arrived today, but not the ones with sloths on them.

Had to re-send a box to a student. They're an intern at a big company and the mail room doesn't know who they are so it got marked return to sender.

The cat has decided to help me set up the space for my online class next week. She's in frame both when she decides to be in my lap or if she wants to sit on the chair next to me.

Today the post office does not have an exit. I was stuck blocking traffic while 20 vehicles left through something that some idiot designed as an entrance only, but they had no choice because the exit no longer existed due to road construction. How 20 vehicles managed to be done with their mailing at the same time to cause such a huge blockage is a mystery. I also used the not an exit after leaving my 24 boxes (all regional rate A).

Just happened to take a look at my YouTube analytics and for some unknown reason Google Search all of the sudden started directing a ton of people to one of my old coffee roasting videos yesterday. No clue what that's all about.

I'm reminded of a couple industry friends of mine. One of them helped me (and many other people) develop a curriculum that's been used all over the world. The other was paid a lot of money by the company the first one worked for to come in and teach that, apparently unaware that they already had one of the authors of those classes working for them.

That's kind of fun since they're more likely to just put the coffees on their cupping table at work and send a big aggregated report from their sensory team.

Looking through my student list since I need to ship coffees for that now, some of the people in the class work for extremely huge roasting companies.

Production test batches of the new Ethiopian coffee both turned out nice so I'll have a tart, sweet light roast with berry undertones and a dark roast that's got a neat bergamot thing going on.

The cat thinks I should get one of those sweaters with a cat pouch, but I'm not going to do that.

I need to taste production test batches tomorrow, but if all goes well my next coffee from Ethiopia will be available as both a light and a dark roast.