Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Production test batches turned out well. I'm seeing about updating some blends to use that next.

9 is representative of what I'm looking for in a dark roast for this coffee, while 12 is just perfect for something that you'd sell not as Guatemala Antigua but as French Roast, and since my Brazilian coffee isn't here yet I think I'll try that.

6 is firmly in line with what I've done with this lot in the past for a medium roast. It was a toss up between this and 5 for that, and 6 was just generally a nicer roast. Better body and balance, more interesting flavor. Coffees in this range had a very nice caramel fragrance straight out of the roaster.

3 is what I'd do if I were looking for a light roast, though it's only just barely fitting my definition of that, roasted to a point just a tiny bit before the start of 2nd crack. Sweet, has a very subtle lemon flavor that a lot of people would fail to notice. I'm not going to do a production test batch of this one because I don't have the shelf space to add it and if I did try selling all four, this is the one that my customers would buy the least.

From lightest to darkest, those would be cups 3, 6, 9, and 12.

Test batch on the new coffee from Guatemala had some really nice flavors at some points, some really boring flavors on others. Nothing offensive, but four of the twelve cups were distinct expressions of that coffee which I could potentially sell if I had the shelf space for that. The next step is production test batches which I'll taste (this time out of 3L airpots instead of cupping bowls) before deciding if those are what I want to sell.

The new fan on the roaster cam arrived with some shipping damage (2 of the plastic supports at the back snapped, a third missing about 1cm) and after about 3 hours of coffee roasting today it stopped spinning because the mis-aligned fan blades would contact the outer housing. Ordered a new fan as well as another powered usb hub so I can take the one I grabbed from home back.

If I were using any other program for logging my roasting data, this type of exploratory work would be a lot harder if not impossible.

Typica already has the ability to do things like that so it's just a tweak to do things like that in response to activating the start and stop buttons in the logging view. The other side of that also looks very easy.

Rough drafted the next chunk of code I want to toss on the aux computer connected to the roaster cam. The next thing that I want to do is start recording every image captured for lots of batches and to get the start and end points of those recordings right I'll want to make that controllable over the local network and send those commands over from Typica as part of my existing workflow.

Other news: I have my repaired car back and one of my coffee deliveries arrived with about 900 pounds of coffee on it. That includes the Guatemalan coffee that I removed from the web site so I wouldn't accidentally sell too much of that. I've roasted a test batch of that so I have 12 roast levels to taste tomorrow and figure out what I want to do with that. If all goes well, I should be able to make the new lot available for sale some time on Sunday (if things don't go well, it will take longer)

It turns out that the addition of the fan increased power draw too much for the aux computer, but I grabbed a powered usb hub from home and now it works again.

Roaster cam is reinstalled, now with a giant heat sink and a fan.

Yesterday I sent the roaster cam back to Madison for the next round of hardware updates and now UPS says I can expect to see that returned to me tomorrow. It's coming back to me with a big heat sink and fan hacked on the end which should help a lot with measurement consistency from batch to batch and make it easier for me to work my signal processing mojo to get a more useful measurement stream out of the system.

Having some kringle. The bakery across the street ran out of half & half so they bartered a kringle for the 7 ounces of that they needed.

Uploading the new video. It'll take a while.

Freight generally is moving more slowly right now, and with that combined with my current orders coming from farther away than they often do, it's going to take some time for the new coffees to show up on the shelves. I'm going to need to figure out some possibly short term blend substitutions for blends that I decide to not just sell out of. I've already removed some offerings from the web site so I don't accidentally sell too much of coffees I won't be able to ship promptly.

Tonight the cat has requested all the cuddles.