Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

I think I need to figure out how to get a dentist to look at me tomorrow. Half of my jaw is numb and my face is swelling.

The brewery that made some beer with my coffee is doing another batch.

The free puzzle shelf now has signs explaining the concept in English, French, and Spanish. That covers the most common languages I hear people speaking here. Italian is rare here (only hear that a few times a year) and the German speakers do a lot of code switching so I figure they're covered.

My car still smells like last night's pizza.

My phone went beep. Someone sent me a cat pic.

There's a local election coming up. I vote for the people who are daily customers because they tend to be helpful about getting problems fixed and providing information. Elected officials who hide from the people are bad news.

When you run into a coffee like that, it can be interesting to sort a sample of that back out into its constituent parts and try roasting the separate components and comparing those with the combined coffee. You'll often find that the combined coffee is superior to either selection, and doing that exercise is a good way to start busting myths that some green coffee buyers believe about excessive sorting.

While writing about blending that sometimes happens at origin (at the mill or exporter) I got to use the phrase "bimodal distribution". Finding a raw coffee with a bimodal distribution on some physical attribute (color of the raw seed is easiest to spot) is a good indication that some kind of blending happened before the coffee reached the roaster.

The cat's on a rampage.

I put too much crushed pepper on my pizza.

It's been almost 9 months since I put anything on my blog. I should probably do something about that, but not today.

Updating my

I know a guy who complains about his company's "blend to value" program, but there are actually creative ways to use neutral blenders and I'm not sure if there's any literature on that at the moment so I'm spending some time writing on that. Cost control/profit enhancement/price stability is only one aspect there (also mentioned) which tends to be the only focus when that's discussed.

Had some time to work on the roasting book again today so I'm working on the first chapter on blending. Lots of people are intimidated by blending, but it's too important a part of many product lines to leave out.

Puzzle shelf is set up and people are already using it. The concept is you can choose a puzzle you like, take it home free, put it together, and when you're done you can bring it back so someone else can enjoy it.

Tonight I'll be loading empty boxes into my car. Tomorrow I'll be filling those up with puzzles. A business on the other side of town is going out of business and I've agreed to take over their puzzle exchange. It goes well with the already existing shelf of free books.

Spam: This is Your Final Notice of Domain Listing
Me: If only

Plus they'll get to taste the same coffee roasted in 18 different ways (9 in a light to dark progression, 9 showing the impact of timing changes in different parts of a light, medium, or dark roast) and learn how to reason about what they're tasting and how to connect that to their roasting data.

It should be a fun class. There are a lot of coffee roasters who get trained in a single very specific approach to coffee roasting or who read stuff that convinces them that they must do things in a certain way and this class is all about breaking that down and empowering roasters to understand the contributions they can make to the finished product and how to make decisions that are right for their coffees, right for their business, and right for their customers.