Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Starting the day by tasting production test batches of new decaf coffees. Starting out with an Ethiopian coffee. This is the one that I was least confident in as rather than finding exactly what I wanted in my initial exploratory testing, I found some different things that I liked and needed to design a new roasting plan to try to get all of that in the cup at the same time. Worked out well. Good balance of body and acidity, citric and melon flavors.

Quality time with the cat

In the 4 hours the shop was open today, we raised $991.72 for the food bank. The check we write will be larger because we always get some people who couldn't make the event chipping in a little extra and the shop will also put a little extra in.

Full shop for today's fundraiser. Every January 1 for the past 25 years we open for limited hours and donate drink sales to charity. This year that's going to Racine County Food Bank.

Roast level testing on the new decaf Sumatra gets super sweet on the 2nd sip.

This is the time of year that I'm especially grateful for having spent the time writing Typica. It's so much faster (and more accurate) to sanity check quantities from a report pulled from the database than to estimate quantities of partial sacks of green coffee, match up stock with the right invoice in a filing cabinet, and multiply all of that out by hand.

https://typica.us/

Happy Inventory Day!

Also, someone snuck in an online order for Holiday Blend. I'll be pulling that off the site probably tomorrow, so if anybody else wants to get in on my last batch of this year's Holiday Blend, now's the time to place that order.

https://wilsonscoffee.com/

There's not as much distinction in the colors as would normally be the case because decaf coffees start out brown.

New decaf from Sumatra #ComingSoon

ugh, bad night for lung function

From today's writing:

"This is not a best practice, but if management is insistent on such a misguided approach, you can at least make your sample evaluation relevant to that reality."

Today lots of people are buying coffee to use in the espresso machines they got for Christmas.

Today I got an email with no body. The whole message fit in a reasonably short subject field so that's where it went. No reply needed. Wish I got more email like that.

Today's work was all about sample roasting. It's heavily based on an article I wrote around 3.5 years ago, but fit with the context of the surrounding chapters and updated to reflect current practices.

Another good day for writing. If I keep up this pace I might have my first draft of the ebook I mentioned earlier done before the end of the year. Maybe get it through editing, technical review, and layout in January? I have too many projects as it is so I'd like to knock this one out as quickly as I can.

In line for lunch there was a guy who was offering everybody coupons. I looked at the coupon and declined because it was for more food than I was going to eat, but the person in front of me failed to realize that she also wasn't getting enough food to use the coupon so I got what was needed so the two of us could split the coupon and we each saved a little money on lunch.