Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

The coffee arrived before the Out for Delivery email did.

Coffee was delivered on the earlier side of delivery window and staff has rearranged themselves so I'll be able to get more done today than I was expecting. Today's delivery has new coffees from East Timor, Panama, and a decaf Colombia.

Production test batches of the new decafs went well. I still need to produce new labels and finalize the pricing on those today. More coffee is scheduled to be delivered tomorrow.

Had to turn off a news feed on my phone because the don't show me from this site option went away and there doesn't seem to be an off switch for AI summaries where I'd much rather just see the source material being summarized.

As for the new decaf Mexican coffee, light roast performance was pretty good while the coffee was hot, but less impressive as the coffee cooled. I'm going to try doing both a medium and a dark roast on this one. The medium is a nice medium everything sort of coffee and the dark is in line with something you'd label Vienna Roast but a very good example of that flavor profile. As always, that depends on verification of production test batches.

Rich, smooth. Will probably work well in an espresso blend. I still need to do a production test batch to match what's on the cupping table and see how this does in a drip brew before writing the label text and finalizing the pricing.

Today's coffee tasting is two new decaf coffees. Buying decafs is a challenge right now as supplies are fairly limited, stuff isn't all located in the same warehouse, and prices are way too high, but telling people, sorry, we're dropping decafs until market conditions improve is not something I want to do. Anyway, the new decaf Sumatran coffee is delicious across a broad range of roasts, but I decided to go with one that's sort of right on the edge between what I'd call a medium or a dark roast.

Them: Can we set up a zoom to start a half hour before closing during the holiday season for a totally unimportant chat?
Me (in my head as I ignore the request entirely): What is wrong with you?

Bought more coffee. It's all more expensive than I'd like but I knew it would be. Trying to balance being able to afford it, having a good selection, and not having too much stock when prices come back down so that I can lower my prices when market conditions improve. It's hard to do that this year.

Food bank food donation box is up. We don't normally have those until closer to New Year's but it seemed like having an extra round of collections might be useful. They'll bring a cash donation box around later, but those had been stored on a shelf too high to safely retrieve. We'll have those up for a couple weeks and then after the holidays we'll bring them back again.

Assuming Congress continues to be useless it looks like my health insurance bill will be almost exactly 3x higher in 2026 compared with this year for a plan that's slightly worse.

It took a while, but the new limited edition Sumatran coffee is up for sale on the web site now. I've copied in some of my notes from the product development process as well that some might find interesting even if they don't want to buy the coffee. https://wilsonscoffee.com/products/sumatralimited.html

Got one of those power strips that can be mounted on to the side of a table. The cord on that is long enough that I can run it from an outlet where I don't have to create a trip hazard and I get a little more flexibility in how the stuff plugged into that is arranged now. It also has USB charging ports (A and C) but I don't have any immediate need for those where I've put this.

Grocery store didn't have everything I wanted to buy, but I was able to hit some good sales to the tune of 30% of the bill.

Tried and failed to come up with this year's Holiday Blend. Hopefully I have a chance to get better focus on this tomorrow.

Any offer I'd be willing to accept right now would have to be substantially above a fair market value to compensate for the annoyance and expense of finding another place to live and moving all my stuff there.

Kind of wish the home investors would collectively take me off their mailing list. I have no interest in the hassle of moving, don't want to have to go looking for another place, and the unsolicited offers are coming in at half of what the house next door is listed at. I've been in that house. Mine is better, so the offers seem frankly exploitatively low ball and unserious.

There was mystery bakery waiting for me when I got to work today.

Found a very nice coffee dead center in the range that I consider as where potentially delicious light roasts can be found. There was also a neat dark roast a bit lighter than what I had with breakfast where it's not so interesting on the first sip or when fully cooled, but if you chug it when half cooled it's great. But between the very limited supply that I have and the high price I'm going to need to charge, I think it makes more sense to only offer the lighter roast.

Before doing the tasting to see how I want to roast it, I've made myself a cup of the super dark stuff that's left over to roast those lighter samples and despite the roast it's still... unique. Clearly dark, but with a bit of lychee and an effervescent quality, almost as if it were made with fizzy water. Hoping I'll find something in my samples that presents with better balance because as a super dark roast it mostly just comes across as weird. Interesting, but not especially accessible.