Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Yesterday's test production batch is quite nice. Sumatran coffee, medium roast (getting near to where I'd start considering it a dark roast but not quite there yet). I've been buying this mark for a while now because while it still has that traditional Sumatran earthiness and thick body, if you roast it right you can also pull out this neat apricot note that I think is just delightful.

Just unloaded another 2500ish pounds of coffee. It's hard to do that while the alley is still full of ice.

Got the bill for the replacement water meter (old one froze) at home today. It's not too bad.

The cat thinks my arm is delicious.

Trying to enjoy dinner but the cat is yelling at me.

A supplier wanted to mail back a check, but the check they wanted to mail back didn't come from me so I told them there's no way that would be the right thing to do and they'll do some more research and hopefully figure out which account they should be applying that money toward.

It turns out that while there are clear flavor differences among each of the cups, most of them are quite good. That's useful to know when talking with home roasters because this means they can put the coffee pretty much wherever they generally like coffees and there's a good chance it'll be delicious. That isn't always (or usually) the case.

One of the coffees that arrived yesterday. I taste every new coffee roasted lots of different ways to figure out the approach I want to take in production. Even very similar coffees that might taste the same from one season to the next might require slightly different approaches to roasting to get that match.

The old card was made in TeX.

The new card was made in Krita.

The previous design was double sided with one side having info relevant for my shop and the other having info relevant for Typica, but that doesn't leave a lot of space for notes and if someone isn't writing on a business card they probably didn't need to get one.

It's tricky because I don't want to overload recipients with a lot of info. I also don't want to do multiple designs and have to worry about which one to hand each person. But the reasons someone might want to work with me are seriously all over the place.

Designed a new business card for the next trade event. Instead of a title it says, "I make coffee better." Name, email address, and three web sites. Back has a nice big area for people to write notes on, and the border has my whole bean and ground coffee degree of roast reference photo that I've been using lately.

(one of these days I should make it possible to buy coffee from me online, but every time I start working on that other projects keep taking priority before I can get it done)

One of my suppliers has decided to embrace the 1980s by no longer selling product through their web site. Now I have to buy through a distributor who is really just having them drop ship my order anyway so it's not like there's any labor saving there unless their back end systems were fragmented and awful. I don't really get why companies leave profit on the table by doing stuff like that (they were charging me more than they're charging distributors), but it is what it is.

Only 2/3 of the coffee I ordered arrived today, so that's disappointing. It hardly makes sense to only get about 600 pounds. I've got a couple thousand pounds on the way from another supplier.

Cat recognition.

https://www.vice.com/en_in/article/a34q3e/facial-recognition-diy-pets-cats-dogs