Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

The overpriced comment is not a knock on quality (which is very good) or value, just that customers are going to look at the price, look at the size of the thing, and decide to not buy it from me. I'm sure there are other shops with customers who would go for it.

Decided to add another chocolate bar supplier that one of the sales reps we buy other stuff from also handles. He's been trying to sell us on them for a while now and while their small things are egregiously overpriced (so I'm not ordering any of that) for my customers, their full sized bars are priced reasonably for the level of quality and I think it's a good time to bring something new in and see how it does. This will also make the dark chocolate fans happy. Several new options for them.

Oh joy, I guess I'm learning how to deal with docker now (or rather, I fixed my issue and will now promptly forget all of that)

First attempt at reworking the espresso blend with the new ingredients was one of those where I'd be happy to be served that somewhere else, but it's entirely the wrong character for what I want to do here. 2nd attempt brought it in line with what I'm trying to do with this here.

Darker roast on the new coffee from Bolivia also turned out as expected. Full body, slightly sweet despite the roast, very smooth. It's been a while since I brought in a Fair Trade Certified coffee that wasn't a decaf so that's also a nice feature. Need to put together new product labels for this one.

Evaluating production test batches of new coffees today. New French Roast tastes like French Roast. It looks like I'll also be able to lower the price on that a little bit, so that's good.

2nd coffee I'm working on today was more straightforward. I found exactly what I was looking for in one of the roasts while the other I think I'll find right in between two of the roasts I tried. No need to edit the plans for that. I can just load what I did on the little machine directly.

The faster data series here is what happened at the roaster for the darker of the roasts that is closest to what I want. The slower one is how I've decided to stretch that out. For the lighter option, I'll try the same plan just stopping quite a bit earlier.

First coffee that I'm working on today it seems like I'll want to slow the roast down significantly. There's good flavors in there and I'll be able to get the coffee to do what I want, but my first guess at an overall profile was just way too fast. I'll load the data into https://crucs.net/ and tweak things there before trying again. Very glad I spent the time working on that roast plan editor.

Went looking for a crash condition that I noticed last night, this time with a debugger attached. The crash was triggered a couple lines earlier than I was expecting (thinking about it a little more I do understand why), but the fix is the same regardless so that's solved.

One of my wholesale customers expressed interest in one of the coffees delivered today so I'll use dropping a sample off as an excuse to check out their place now that they're open.

The new paper is pretty nice, thick, oddly textured. One of my employees is going to take it home and use it as weird gift wrap.

Coffee has arrived. The paper used to separate organic certified coffee from not certified coffee has changed. This is something that really doesn't matter to me because the legislation around organic labeling has for a long time been written purely for regulatory capture by big food companies against the smaller businesses that built the market for organic products and our response to that was to keep buying organic coffees when they're good but not sell them as such.

Today someone was very disappointed that a place calling itself "Wilson's Coffee & Tea" sells coffee instead of cell phones.

I don't have a delivery window, but it looks like I'm getting coffee tomorrow.

Had a weird issue when trying to move the latest code over to the machine at the coffee roaster. One symbol from a library the code uses failed to resolve. It's definitely not something new that got added since the library was installed on that machine, but the version present does seem to be about 4 years old and uninstalling the old library and installing the latest version and dev headers fixed the issue.

I had a hunch that the number was higher, but running the report I was surprised by how much higher the proportion of sales that aren't in store retail are (so wholesale, online, &c). Normally that's under 1%. Early pandemic dropped that closer to 0. So far this year it's at about 2.3% and it would be higher than usual even if it weren't for our most recent wholesale customer. Not bad considering that we put pretty much no effort into those segments.

Bought another 1600ish pounds of coffee. Mostly stuff that I haven't carried in a while.

Despite being well over 100 years old, it's only been held by 2 families including the carpenter who built it for himself so I already know a lot about how the house has changed in that time.

Got a letter at home from one of the non-profits my shop works with, which was very confusing, but it's because my house is old and part of their work is documenting old houses.