Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Today I emailed a photo of a page from an almost exactly 20 year old coffee roaster user manual (dated November, 1998) with cleaning, maintenance, and the importance of fire safety. I hear that these days roaster fires are called "thermal events". Whatever you call it, you don't want to have one. They're super-obnoxious to put out.

Rolling cat

Punk is rolling around.

It's important to do exercises like this to develop ways of thinking about the flavors in coffee and how these relate to where the coffee comes from, how the coffee was harvested and processed, and how the coffee was roasted. A certain level of abstraction is needed when customers ask for advice on what coffee they should try next, especially when they don't have the training and vocabulary to articulate what they want.

Did the major coffee regions tasting/mini lecture with the newest hire. We had coffees from Kenya (Africa), Sulawesi (Pacific), Brazil (America), and the same Brazilian coffee roasted really dark, all made as French press (because we have enough of these that they can be brewed in parallel).

The cat has been spending less time cuddling and more time looking at the snow in the back yard lately. It's still a lot of cuddling time.

Need to set aside some time to do software updates on my servers. It's been too long since I did that.

Apparently there are no classifications for video games falling between AAA and B (nor any below B)? There are no AA games, A games, C games, S games, &c.

If I listed out the games that I've played the most or that had the biggest impact on me or that I've had the most fun with, I'd probably have to go pretty far down any of those lists before hitting a AAA title (then again, I've genuinely enjoyed games that I'll readily admit are not good games).

I wish my cat were trained to give back massage.

Lots of fragile stickers and the like for stuff that's in enough layers of good boxes that the stuff would probably survive getting driven off a dock.

Freight truck #2 for the day had a delivery encased in an insane amount of plastic for stuff made mostly out of steel.

Grind was covered in an article I wrote about centerlining your cupping protocol. Time is something that I've mainly covered in forum posts and in person classes. I don't think I've ever specifically covered spoon technique and that's an area where a video demonstration might be particularly valuable.

Most people prefer instead to go for enhanced skimming techniques that destroy cup to cup extraction consistency. That's not something that should be encouraged.

60 Second Coffee Tips was not a series that did particularly well, but I think I want to make another 3 episodes of that soon about how to deal with coffee grounds that remain on top of cupping bowls after skimming, each covering a different thing you can change if this is a problem: grind, time, and technique.

I'm not sure how this happened but I somehow managed to get pulseaudio to consume about 5.5GB of RAM while nothing was playing any sound.

The traditional Christmas animals: reindeer, hedgehog, sloth.

Freight company apparently just wanted to wait for some fresh snow before delivering the coffee. The alley was slippery enough that getting the coffee into the shop became a 2 person job because my feet would just slide on the ice when I tried to push the hand cart up the ramp. I think that's probably my last coffee delivery for the year.

How much energy do cats burn on vibrating?

I need to stop letting my mother buy shipping tape for the shop. She never picks the good stuff, preferring instead for things that don't cut easily from the tape dispenser yet also manage to fail to stick to the boxes. In bulk.