Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

I want a beverage but there's a cat sitting on me.

2 boxes of Roasting Styles Exploration Kit have been packed. A missing word in the write up included with each box has been corrected (I wonder if anybody getting one of the first 6 will mention noticing that). I just need an outer label and a price to see if anybody local is interested in buying those. Once those two are gone, that's it. I'm not making more unless I can expect to move at least 10 of them.

Today I took 6 boxes of Roasting Styles Exploration Kit to the post office. I have enough coffee to maybe make up 1 or 2 more boxes, but if I need more than that I'd have to roast more coffee so I'd want to know I had demand for a bunch of boxes before doing that to avoid wasting a lot of coffee I could otherwise sell as normal product.

@debugninja@banana.dog I'm using a System76 Oryx Pro as my daily driver. Works well EXCEPT: I've replaced the CPU fan (and instead of sending the correct replacement part they sent GPU fans multiple times), a bunch of keyboard keys and the keyboard backlight has failed, and while firmware updates seem to have fixed it, early on I had some troubles where the machine would get itself into a state where the only way to restart was to open the case and disconnect/reconnect the battery cable.

@debugninja@banana.dog I just want something thick enough to fit working fans and a keyboard that doesn't self-destruct before I'm ready to upgrade.

The selection criteria is people I think might find it interesting, people who have worked with me on fun stuff in the past, and people who I have a good recent mailing address to send stuff to (I don't want to send emails asking people for a good address to ship stuff to).

Shipping out another set of Roasting Style Exploration Kit to a few select friends in coffee.

@gnomon Hope it goes through okay. It's been a long time since I mailed anything to Canada.

This one is getting shipped to @gnomon

Waiting on the heat sealer before assembling my prototype of the Roasting Styles Exploration Kit. It includes a half pound each of three different approaches to roasting a single coffee along with an 8 page write up with technical details on each batch and how those were derived from the initial exploratory roast.

@gnomon Got it and your shipping info. Will toss that in the mail Monday.

@gnomon If you did want to send money, there's a link in my profile and that form has successfully taken money from Canada.

@gnomon I was actually just going to not charge for that since this isn't a real product yet.

@gnomon If you want to send a shipping address to me: neal@typica.us I can send a prototype while I work on the write up. Would be interested in knowing how well the observations hold up with other people's water.

Another phishing attempt claiming to be from my mail administrator warning that all my email will be deleted if I don't do something. This immediately doesn't check out because I am the mail administrator and I most certainly would not have sent such an email to myself.

It's a nice enough example that I'm considering possibly writing up a little booklet and doing a gift pack: maybe half a pound from each roast and optionally a couple pounds of the green so that home roasters can try the coffees, read the info, and either try to replicate their favorite or improve on the results for their own preferences.

The point of this is that all of these are roasts that different companies might reasonably choose to sell depending on how they see this coffee fitting into their product line and the same methodology can be applied to get to each of these very different results.

Exterior degree of roast has about 10 points between the different roasts (53.5/43.5/32.7), interior colors are similar except there's a much wider spread on the light roast (64.8/46.9/33.3).

The light roast does the whole consistently (though slightly) declining rate of temperature change throughout and there's a pleasant acidity to the coffee. More of a juicy sweetness than a candy sweetness.

For the medium roast (4°F hotter than start of 2nd crack for end temperature), I really stretched time while the coffee is yellow to push the sweetness and the result is that even just smelling the brewed coffee you might think someone added honey to it. The rate of temperature change consistently and slightly increases throughout the roast and the result is nicely balanced.