Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

It's official: the cat likes me again.

Nevermind. They have an online menu and I'm seeing nothing that interests me tonight.

There were road closed signs on both ends of my block when I left the house today. I hope I still have a street when I get home.

I have some really old gift cards for a place that I never eat because they kept taking whatever I ordered off the menu and changing it to something less good. It's been long enough for the menu to change again that I should see about using those.

Today's code is models all the way down.

In cat news, the cat has mostly forgiven me. Lots of hugs last night.

Some people like that flavor, and in the context of this coffee is sweet and clean, and if that vegetal flavor was intended and enjoyed by this roaster's customer base, good job. Nailed it. Personally, my preference is to always get above that temperature and thus eliminate that particular flavor. You can still do a light roast to a hotter end temperature if that's what you want, but a slightly slower, slightly darker roast would also boost body and sweetness with this coffee.

Very light roast, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but there's a distinct vegetal flavor that comes across like if you were to suck on the raw coffee. I devote a whole slide to this in my latest class and this flavor is highly correlated with ending temperature. On my machine the transition point is a temperature 1/5 between cracks.

First the good. It's obvious that this started out as a high quality raw coffee. No processing defects. Also no roasting defects, good physical development. The bag is reasonably informative and has cool art on it. This coffee had the potential to be super-sweet.

Started tasting the coffees other people gave me. First up is a coffee from Veracruz, Mexico. Semiwashed, roasted in Mexico a couple weeks ago.

The cat was not a fan of my being out of town for almost a week. Requested far below average cuddles last night/this morning.

I wouldn't want something like this to be my only espresso machine because with something like this it's too easy to come up with an espresso that can only be delicious on a similar machine (home espresso enthusiasts and the vast majority of shops need not apply) but as a 2nd machine or outside of a blend development context there's a lot you can do with that.

I got to play around with this a little bit in Boston. The 2 group would just barely fit in my bays (so doesn't leave a lot of work space) and it's out of my budget, but the tech seems solid so I'll have to keep my eye on if they're able to shrink that down a bit both on footprint and price (or for some future 2nd shop). https://www.duvallespresso.com/fc1-machine

The funding display on https://typica.us/ now shows the $100 someone gave me at Expo. That doubled the amount collected so far this year. Thank you.

I also got other people's coffees to enjoy and this cupping spoon.

Another cool gift was this bag made out of defective coffee retail packaging.

front design of shirt

One of the other instructors gave me a shirt at Expo. I considered wearing that today but it still smells from printing so I need to give that a good soak first. (I don't need to smell like vinegar)

Email says that the flight time has changed "due to ETD". In this context I'm pretty sure ETD stands for estimated time of departure, which isn't really a cause you can put after "due to". They may as well just say, "we changed the time of your flight so it's leaving at a different time because we changed the time of the flight," which sounds kind of silly.