Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

The first drip pot of my competition coffee is now brewing. It smelled great when grinding, at least as best I could tell through the mask. I'll be tasting it in private properly distanced from others soon. If it's good, getting that out for sale is my top priority for today.

The cashiers at the office store are sad because the manager is making them work behind a sign with a big glaring typo in the middle and not letting that get fixed.

Match to the roasting plan was perfect with the production test batch of what was originally going to be my competition coffee. Based on the mass loss it looks like I'm going to end up with about 30 pounds roasted available to sell and then it's gone. I'll be tasting this tomorrow to make sure it's good brewed as someone might do that as I've only had this on the cupping table so far.

*giving all of my alchemists cat ears*

Giving up on the code I was trying to integrate for today. The problem will probably end up being a stupid typo somewhere that would be caught at compile time IF I HAD A COMPILER.

Tried to take a picture of the cat smashing her face against the keyboard to hear it click, but she stopped before I could.

Trying to add a new feature to a program but all I've managed to do is make the whole device unresponsive on exit.

New addition to the puzzle exchange. I'm sure @Taweret would love it.

Took a look at how the shop's web site is doing for sales now that that's been taking orders for more than a year. It's down from the April highs, but still like an extra day of sales per month, which is better than I feared it might be when I started working on that.

https://wilsonscoffee.com

The cat usually doesn't go for human food, but she seems intrigued by tonight's shrimp.

Searching for "coffee roasting" on https://sepiasearch.org/ my videos pretty much dominate the first three pages of results. Works as expected.

Supplier tasting notes are citric fruits, and I can bring that out in the roast and get something that smells amazing, but the flavor intensity wasn't following from those aromatics, making the whole experience there somewhat disappointing.

What I ended up doing was pushing through yellow quickly to modulate sweetness into a caramel apple expression (so completely different from the supplier's tasting notes), stretch the range after that but prior to 1C to get more of the reactants I'd want available later in the roast, then accelerate into and through first crack right to the edge of 2C to boost the body and get a really interesting cup complexity going on with chocolate, caramel, and apple notes richly textured and changing.

At the time I joked that the experience made me want to enter the competition to be the one person who wasn't afraid of 2nd crack.

The roasting plan I came up with also fits nicely in the narrative of what I found somewhat disturbing that time I judged USRC. While all profile options were on the table for this, the overall approach and final profile decision was very different from what competitors in that described, especially with their compulsory coffee which everybody roasted too light.

It took three runs through the lab roaster, but I think I've decided what I want to do with the competition coffee. I still need to do a production test batch to verify that it's what I want when brewed the way a real person might enjoy the coffee and get my final product spec details documented. If all goes well, I'll probably have 3 or 4 small batches total before I run out of coffee. I'd rather do that than roast all of it at once because this will have to be expensive and may not sell fast.