Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Most of today's work involved drinking coffee, but I got all of that finished. Lots of new stuff will be hitting the shelves tomorrow.

New coffee from East Timor has a ton of sweetness to it. Very dark roasts don't taste as dark as they are, and there are a couple of big ranges where the differences from one roast level to the next are very subtle. I'm leaning toward something right on the edge before dark roast characteristics start to be detectable where the overall balance of flavors is excellent.

The coffee arrived before the Out for Delivery email did.

Coffee was delivered on the earlier side of delivery window and staff has rearranged themselves so I'll be able to get more done today than I was expecting. Today's delivery has new coffees from East Timor, Panama, and a decaf Colombia.

Production test batches of the new decafs went well. I still need to produce new labels and finalize the pricing on those today. More coffee is scheduled to be delivered tomorrow.

Had to turn off a news feed on my phone because the don't show me from this site option went away and there doesn't seem to be an off switch for AI summaries where I'd much rather just see the source material being summarized.

As for the new decaf Mexican coffee, light roast performance was pretty good while the coffee was hot, but less impressive as the coffee cooled. I'm going to try doing both a medium and a dark roast on this one. The medium is a nice medium everything sort of coffee and the dark is in line with something you'd label Vienna Roast but a very good example of that flavor profile. As always, that depends on verification of production test batches.

@mhoye I'm old enough to remember phones like that. As for the latter, maybe 1968 if you squint hard enough.

Rich, smooth. Will probably work well in an espresso blend. I still need to do a production test batch to match what's on the cupping table and see how this does in a drip brew before writing the label text and finalizing the pricing.

Today's coffee tasting is two new decaf coffees. Buying decafs is a challenge right now as supplies are fairly limited, stuff isn't all located in the same warehouse, and prices are way too high, but telling people, sorry, we're dropping decafs until market conditions improve is not something I want to do. Anyway, the new decaf Sumatran coffee is delicious across a broad range of roasts, but I decided to go with one that's sort of right on the edge between what I'd call a medium or a dark roast.

@mntmn or facebook

Them: Can we set up a zoom to start a half hour before closing during the holiday season for a totally unimportant chat?
Me (in my head as I ignore the request entirely): What is wrong with you?

Bought more coffee. It's all more expensive than I'd like but I knew it would be. Trying to balance being able to afford it, having a good selection, and not having too much stock when prices come back down so that I can lower my prices when market conditions improve. It's hard to do that this year.

@mhoye I have pet the dogs already.

@mhoye Have they added the cat to that game yet? I heard that was a planned update but haven't checked back in on it.

@stux I've been to a lot of places that were easier for me to enter than it sometimes is trying to get back into the US even as a citizen. There's certainly still a lot here that I think is worth a visit, but I'd seriously consider alternatives at the moment.

@mhoye I still remember the Hypercard stack that came with my first Mac that goes through things like point, click, drag, feed the fish. Big paper manuals full of screenshots were also a thing and they assumed far less familiarity with operational concepts. These days I feel like I could use one of those just to know what capabilities have been hidden behind invisible gestures.

@fribbledom Wait, AI is putting cats out of work now?

Food bank food donation box is up. We don't normally have those until closer to New Year's but it seemed like having an extra round of collections might be useful. They'll bring a cash donation box around later, but those had been stored on a shelf too high to safely retrieve. We'll have those up for a couple weeks and then after the holidays we'll bring them back again.

Assuming Congress continues to be useless it looks like my health insurance bill will be almost exactly 3x higher in 2026 compared with this year for a plan that's slightly worse.