Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Quality time with the cat

#caturday profile

USPS claims to have delivered 4 of 6 boxes of Roasting Styles Exploration Kit that got mailed. One had a failed delivery attempt and the other is going to Canada and will take a while because of that. Shop's web site is updated with a new coffee from Brazil and removal of a coffee from Peru which I can't roast any more of (some is still available in shop).

Today I'm wearing the objectively best sports mascot.

Given that only 8 of the Roasting Styles Exploration Kit boxes were made and there's some good information inside, I've decided to share the PDF. Here it is:

https://atelier.wilsonscoffee.com/s/3zfAmtXFKsAEis4

I want a beverage but there's a cat sitting on me.

2 boxes of Roasting Styles Exploration Kit have been packed. A missing word in the write up included with each box has been corrected (I wonder if anybody getting one of the first 6 will mention noticing that). I just need an outer label and a price to see if anybody local is interested in buying those. Once those two are gone, that's it. I'm not making more unless I can expect to move at least 10 of them.

Today I took 6 boxes of Roasting Styles Exploration Kit to the post office. I have enough coffee to maybe make up 1 or 2 more boxes, but if I need more than that I'd have to roast more coffee so I'd want to know I had demand for a bunch of boxes before doing that to avoid wasting a lot of coffee I could otherwise sell as normal product.

The selection criteria is people I think might find it interesting, people who have worked with me on fun stuff in the past, and people who I have a good recent mailing address to send stuff to (I don't want to send emails asking people for a good address to ship stuff to).

Shipping out another set of Roasting Style Exploration Kit to a few select friends in coffee.

This one is getting shipped to @gnomon

Waiting on the heat sealer before assembling my prototype of the Roasting Styles Exploration Kit. It includes a half pound each of three different approaches to roasting a single coffee along with an 8 page write up with technical details on each batch and how those were derived from the initial exploratory roast.

Another phishing attempt claiming to be from my mail administrator warning that all my email will be deleted if I don't do something. This immediately doesn't check out because I am the mail administrator and I most certainly would not have sent such an email to myself.

It's a nice enough example that I'm considering possibly writing up a little booklet and doing a gift pack: maybe half a pound from each roast and optionally a couple pounds of the green so that home roasters can try the coffees, read the info, and either try to replicate their favorite or improve on the results for their own preferences.

The point of this is that all of these are roasts that different companies might reasonably choose to sell depending on how they see this coffee fitting into their product line and the same methodology can be applied to get to each of these very different results.

Exterior degree of roast has about 10 points between the different roasts (53.5/43.5/32.7), interior colors are similar except there's a much wider spread on the light roast (64.8/46.9/33.3).

The light roast does the whole consistently (though slightly) declining rate of temperature change throughout and there's a pleasant acidity to the coffee. More of a juicy sweetness than a candy sweetness.

For the medium roast (4°F hotter than start of 2nd crack for end temperature), I really stretched time while the coffee is yellow to push the sweetness and the result is that even just smelling the brewed coffee you might think someone added honey to it. The rate of temperature change consistently and slightly increases throughout the roast and the result is nicely balanced.

The dark roast uses a traditional S curve, often a good place to start for dark roasts as it hits the balance of producing flavors that only develop at darker roasts without completely destroying the pleasant flavors developed earlier in the roast. Especially as the coffee cools it's a medium-heavy bodied coffee with good sweetness and clove spice. A bit of smokiness on the first sip that diminishes as the coffee cools.

To use as an example in the book, I took the latest coffee from Sulawesi which so impressed me during the initial exploratory roast and developed roasting plans not only for the dark roast version that I intend to sell, but also a medium and light roast version so I could write about the process from those different perspectives with the same coffee.