Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

THERE. ARE. FOUR. LIGHTS. shining on the espresso work space.

Long day, lots of coffee tasting. I want to be asleep.

Tomorrow is the last day of the half price drink sale so anybody in the Racine, WI area might want to pop in and take advantage of that.

A group of customers is having a kringle taste testing. Kringle from 3 different bakeries in a side by side by side comparison.

Blend #6 could be simplified, and that's all the blend redesign work that I have for today.

Blend #5 required minor and what many would consider counterintuitive modification.

Blend #4 required severe recipe modification.

Blend #3 is a little more complicated but that's sorted out now.

Blend #2: Direct substitution of ingredients still tastes right.

Blend #1: direct substitution and switching from a 3:2 to a 1:1 brings the flavor back to spec.

First I'll look at the blends where I have new ingredients that might just be directly substitutable or only require minor adjustments to the proportion of ingredients. A couple of the blends are things that I traditionally only use 2 coffees in usually a 1:1 (50%/50%) or 3:2 (60%/40%) ratio.

So that's four production test batches of new coffees, each one came out how I expected it to and can go out for sale once I get new labels put together, but next up is reworking half a dozen blends so I can make those taste right with coffees that still exist.

The new coffee from Colombia (Don Enrique Reserve Supremo) landed firmly in the middle of my medium roast range, but it's a relatively fast roast with very aggressive cracking. Bright, sweet, well balanced.

The other coffee from Burundi is taken to a light roast. Bright, tart, but I get the coffee hot enough (see the May episode of Coffee and Code, about 20ish minutes in I think?) that it doesn't have that raw (green) coffee flavor that too many light roast coffees from other roasters have these days. I approve of this coffee.

https://video.typica.us/videos/watch/dd83fb76-08de-4d3a-b995-841ef3fada73

For the two coffees from Burundi, I'm using different roasting styles to make these seem more different from each other than would be the case if I picked similar roasts. In both cases there were nice possibilities through a broad range. The first one is on the lighter side of a dark roast where it develops a nice bittersweet chocolate flavor that's absent at lighter roasts of this coffee while still preserving some body and acidity.

The French Roast tastes like French Roast. This is the one that came in at 25.6/25.6 yesterday.

Lots of taste testing on my work schedule today. First up, production test batches of four new coffees: new French Roast, new Colombian, and 2 new coffees from Burundi. After that it's reworking half a dozen blend recipes to use coffees that still exist.