Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Because of how much I spent on the new coffee from Yemen, it looks like the new Mocha Java Blend is going to be a little more expensive than anything currently in the product line, and then the new Yemen will be more than that. Setting the retail pricing for the new coffee from Yemen at $27 per pound (margin is a little lower than I'd like at that), Mocha Java Blend at $22 per pound.

More data acquisition hardware arrived today. I'll need to add some code to my software to support that (should be very easy), but this will let the software that I use at the coffee roaster get data from the prototype instrument that I can't talk about. After that prototype arrives I'll have the next challenge of figuring out how to most usefully present the new data series which may or may not involve a little more new code.

This is what I've been working on all day. #RoastingStylesExploration

I got mailing addresses for everybody in the class who failed to provide enough of an address that USPS would be able to deliver. Packing those boxes up today along with a bunch of online orders.

I'm going to have so many boxes to mail tomorrow.

Yesterday I roasted the last of my previous lots of coffee from Brazil and Papua New Guinea, new lots of which also arrived on yesterday's shipment, so those are the next coffees I'll be figuring out, but those are not ready to taste today.

Cups on the lighter end had great sweetness but lacked body. Cups on the darker end had the body, but lacked the sweetness. In the end, I decided to use cup 6 as a starting point (right at the start of second crack) but make several adjustments to the roasting plan to try to try to increase both sweetness and body.

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

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