Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Everybody else can just give up now. This is peak video game fashion.

Tasting production test batches for a medium and dark roast of the new coffee from Bolivia. This is one with pretty low perceived acidity, smooth, easy drinking. I might make this the base of this year's Holiday Blend, but I have a couple more new things to sort out before I move on to figuring that out.

The new dark roast Ethiopian coffee is on brew today. Customers reception has been highly positive so far.

Current cat status

The cat is shoving her face into a mug. I've already consumed the beverage it contained, but she's double checking that there isn't something good for her.

Continuing to work through new coffees. The coffee from Papua New Guinea turned out nicely expressing as a rich, sweet, well balanced medium roast. This will also let me get our Big Island Blend (the PNG is from the world's largest coffee growing island) back out for sale.

The cat thinks I spend too much time at work and not enough time with the cat. She's right, of course, but work pays for the cat food.

The secret to doing good literary analysis of sci fi is understanding that it's a subgenre of erotica.

I should order a pizza for dinner.

There are lots of new coffees expected to hit the shelves soon. My shop has so far resisted having an email mailing list mainly because I hate being on those, but I've convinced myself that I can put one together that I personally would not hate so here's a sign up.

https://tinyletter.com/WilsonsCoffee

I've done a couple other mailing lists with TinyLetter and am satisfied that they do things like unsubscribe and I won't miss the features of other services that exist for dark patterns I want to avoid.

Unloaded a few thousand pounds of coffee. The paperwork somehow still has a dead person as the contact. I should really get my supplier to fix their records on that.

Hmm... Should I take my brands.town parody account and turn it into a real life actual brand? I could do that and have the advantage of it not needing to make money.

Today's spam included a Chinese company that specializes in US imported ICs (which they promise are totally legit). Of course, if I as someone in the US needed ICs that were made in the US, it seems highly unlikely that the best way to get those on any dimension would be to get chips that had already been exported from the US to China and then having those shipped back from China to the US. Also, I'm not sure if they know what "honorary title" means in English.

Yesterday's tasting went on longer than expected so I'm doing production test batches on new things today. More coffee is expected to arrive after the weekend so next week will also be busy with sorting out how I want to deal with new things.

Secret to success in certain kinds of video games: 1. choose to play the cutest healer girl 2. allocate all your skill points into fast damage dealing (not into healing).

The cat wants to lick my hands.

I'll be fleshing this out later, but anybody who wants parody coffee company toots can follow @8thwavecoffee@brands.town to get that soon.

I think I'll run production test batches on both a light and a dark roast, see how those do as drip brews, maybe sell this one two ways.

Then there are other coffees where different roasts taste different, but you can pretty much just do whatever and you'll get something nice out of it. You might like what you get more or less depending on how you roast it, but it'll still be better than what you would have gotten at the grocery store. Those are really my favorite coffees to work with because they highlight the role of the roaster as someone making intentional decisions guiding the flavor that is expressed in the cup.

The first sip confirms the expectation that this is something that I can recommend for my home roasting customers. There are some coffees where there's a very narrow range where the coffee is excellent or maybe a couple disjoint ranges of excellence that are very different from each other but both credibly good. It's hard for me to recommend those to home roasters because it's likely they won't get good results, aren't buying enough to get good at roasting it, don't have the tools they need..