Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Same evaluation protocol, this time with 12 cups, each a different roast level. The first three cups were overly vegetal, the last three cups were too smoky (though the last cup is actually an excellent French Roast to keep in mind if the Brazilian coffee I bought for my next one of those doesn't pan out). The middle six, however, was quite difficult to choose among.

The next coffee to figure out is a peaberry from Blawan Estate on the Indonesian island Java. That means odds are very good I'll be able to put together a nice Mocha Java Blend. When the first Mocha Java Blend was marketed, supply chain traceability was bad enough that the ingredients might not have come from Yemen or Java, but my Mocha Java Blends always do.

Checking the roasting data, cup 6 ended about 13 seconds and 5F° past the start of second crack.

Cup 8 would be a dark roast if I decided to go with that. Medium-heavy body, low acidity, bittersweet chocolate flavor attributes. Cup 6 would be a medium roast. This one is exceptionally well balanced, preserving the honey attribute and the chocolate expressed as more of a milk chocolate. The main deficiency there is a slightly low overall intensity of flavor that I think I can fix with a profile tweak. I'm going to try that for my first production test batch.

Through that middle range, body gets heavier as the coffee gets darker. As the coffee cools, the lighter end doesn't hold up as well, still clearly a good coffee but lacking interesting attributes. Cups 6 and 8, however, hold up particularly well.

As usual, I'm starting by evaluating the coffee across a range of roasts that I hope extends from too light to too dark. In this case, 10 different roast levels. The first two are thin and vegetal, lacking in the qualities that I want out of this coffee. The last two start to get smoky and leathery, which is also not quite what I want, but cups 3-8 are quite pleasant with honey and chocolate attributes.

Most of my experience with Yemeni coffee is very small seeds lacking uniformity in size with a high proportion harvested from unripe fruit. The coffee I'm tasting today is larger (though still on the small side for my shop), more uniform, and from ripe cherries.

Figuring out how I want to roast a couple of the new coffees that arrived yesterday. I'm starting with a Yemen Mocha Hawari. From a purely physical perspective, this is the best Yemeni coffee I've had in my shop, also the most expensive.

There's a cat in the back yard. It's relaxing on a pile of dirt in the back corner of the yard.

Got another couple thousand pounds of coffee. Moving that in made the effects of breakfast wear off so I'm home for an early lunch and shower.

What did they do to you, Miku? #AdHorrors

Manchester resident covers racist graffiti with cat stickers https://matadornetwork.com/read/manchester-art-vigilante-covering-racist-graffiti-cat-stickers/

Did a review of the platform that my online workshop is getting delivered through. It looks pretty easy overall. For slides, I can pre-load a PDF which means I don't have to use PowerPoint and can just do the slides in TeX, which I prefer (I hate fussing with rectangles for sizing and positioning elements and much prefer to just type in exactly what I want and have the computer do that).

Coffee mask

While the state supreme court threw out the state's order, the city of Racine health department has stepped up and reinstated the exact same thing. That means my shop is operating under exactly the same rules (no, we're not reopening our seating area), it's just the issuing authority that's different. Even if we weren't required to follow the rules the state had in place, I'd still be following guidance from the retired nurse on my staff (my mother) instead of being the next outbreak

Asked the cat if she was good today. She did not commit to an answer.

I have shipping addresses for participants in my next class so I'll be packing up boxes of coffee and shipping to them soon. What I'm doing is 10 roasts of one coffee where the roasting plans hit 5 different ending temperatures across a range of light to dark, 2 different profiles to hit those end temperatures, and some unroasted coffee so people can taste those roasts, look at the roasting data, and then think about how they'd approach that coffee or improve on that and they can try their idea.

My phone wants to restart because it has new time zones.

After some investigation, we're going to say that the warehouse failed to put the missing bags out for delivery so there's a bit of a delay on that coffee, but the stuff that did arrive is correct.

Only a third of one of my coffee orders showed up today.