Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

There are people who say their espresso tastes better when the coffee is significantly aged, weeks or months of rest. Personally, I've always advocated for using fresh coffee as espresso and think that if your espresso is better 3 months after roasting you need to fix your roast or come to terms with the idea that maybe you just don't really like espresso. But at a weekend competition, that kind of rest time is not available, so how do you roast the coffee so you don't need that?

The other odd roast that I did yesterday was based on the team competition at the event I'm teaching at. Normally I don't get put on a team so I don't know if I'd be able to try this at the event, but the competition involves roasting a coffee for drip and roasting the coffee a different way for espresso. I'm thinking that this is likely to be won or lost on the espresso side because drip brews are the bread and butter of the American industry, but espresso...

Brewed the custom darker roast of Yemeni coffee I roasted. It's not what I'd choose to sell as a Yemeni coffee, but it's got some nice bittersweet chocolate going on. Not bad for what's pretty much a guess.

For reference, the darkest thing that I do is a decaf French Roast that comes in around 25 on the Agtron Gourmet scale.

Did a custom roast for one of my station instructors. They wanted me to take a coffee that I normally roast to a 54.5 and get it down to a 40 (initially they asked for a 30 but then thought better of it). Didn't quite get there, landing at 41.7/43.3, but he says it's close enough.

Ate giant pretzels for dinner because that's a thing that adults can do.

There was a black cat in the driveway this morning. I guess we're coming up on cat season.

Had an idea that I'd like to try that's really only suitable for competition coffee roasting, but might just be useful for certain kinds of events. Might stay after work a bit to slam out a couple batches on the little machine to see if it works.

I'm out of milk, but I'm also going out of town soon. Do I buy a small quantity of milk and drink extra, go without milk for a couple days, or buy a normal quantity of milk and try to use it up extra fast when I get back from my trip? (I'm leaning toward just giving up milk for a few days)

Wall clock at the shop randomly decided that it needed to set itself 23 hours ahead. Once it stopped spinning I moved it forward another hour to get it back to the right time.

Extra annotations on the previous set of graphs I posted. The old version was made in LibreOffice while this one is mostly my own code but the larger sized text was plopped in with The GIMP.

I thought I had one bug to fix, but it turns out I had two.

Lately I've been working on a new French Roast since I've run out of the coffee I was using for that. Evaluated the production test batch today and it's quite excellent (provided you like a good French Roast, if you hate very dark roasts you won't like it).

This morning the smol cat was in my driveway. It ran under my car when it saw me coming so I needed to be extra careful to make sure it was safe to leave.

There's a smol cat in the back yard.

Also learned that the building that used to have the local furniture store has been bought by a martial arts place. I'm optimistic about that development and expect them to be good for my business (the parents can have a coffee while the kids have their lessons, happened a lot back when we had a dance studio a similar distance away).

Just got an email from my ISP saying they've made my Internet connection faster. Sadly, no mention of upload speeds which is really the only kind of upgrade I'd likely notice. Downloads were plenty fast enough, but I'll take the free upgrade.

Some example data that I pulled together for an upcoming coffee roasting class. The top section shows the temperature of the coffee and inlet air, from which you can get a good sense of the control strategy in play. Below that is rate of change of the coffee temperature. Then below that is a visual spectrum (roaster camera) approximation of the Agtron gourmet scale roast level over time which isn't saturated out of range at the start because this is a decaf coffee which already starts out brown.

The cat has taken one of my hair ties to her box. It was getting worn out anyway so she can have it.

Government screwed up big time when they changed the rules and let dairies claim that ice milk is really ice cream.