Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Finally got to the bottom of a long standing issue. It would have been nice if the error message had been anything even remotely close to root cause of the issue but now it's fixed and I can move on.

Finally finished with getting all the new coffees up on the web site.

People keep trying to give me stuff today. I turned down the old dolls (that I do hope find a more appropriate home) but did accept a cactus.

Ordered more coffee. That might be my last coffee order for the year just depending on if I decide to bring in another limited edition coffee or if I start getting a bunch of crazy huge orders that I'm not expecting.

For my birthday I got myself new bedroom furniture. All stuff that I need to assemble myself so I'm still working on that but the new bed is a definite upgrade.

Most of today's work involved drinking coffee, but I got all of that finished. Lots of new stuff will be hitting the shelves tomorrow.

New coffee from East Timor has a ton of sweetness to it. Very dark roasts don't taste as dark as they are, and there are a couple of big ranges where the differences from one roast level to the next are very subtle. I'm leaning toward something right on the edge before dark roast characteristics start to be detectable where the overall balance of flavors is excellent.

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.