Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

#introduction

I'm part owner and roaster at a little coffee company in Wisconsin. Author of Typica, a popular free program used to capture and work with coffee roasting production records that's used at roasting companies all over the world. Volunteer on the Roasters Guild education committee. Available for paid coffee consulting, training, open source software development. Living with a cat who broke into my house and decided to stay. Likes: cute, travel, food. Dislikes: blinking lights.

So whatever was causing the problem in the first place is may still be hiding somewhere unfixed just no longer causing directly visible problems. I'll use it the next time I roast coffee and see how that goes, but this is something I'll want to come back to later to clean things up properly.

Just did my least favorite kind of bug fix. Gave up on trying to figure out why the erroneous behavior was happening (a variable was being updated with double the expected offset) and rewrote the code to just recalculate the value every time it's needed, at which point everything seemed to start working properly. It's a cheap calculation infrequently performed so it's not like anybody will notice, but I kind of hate that a change that shouldn't have altered the behavior at all ended up fixing it

Lots of big dogs out today.

Always nice to chat when another professional coffee roaster visits my shop.

Fixed a bug. It's not the bug I was trying to fix at the time, but it's one that needed fixing all the same.

There are still a couple places left to switch over to LEDs, but the entire east half of the building is done now and about half of the east half (anything that customers see minus the bathrooms plus the half of the back rooms that's not kitchen).

New lights are installed and working. I told the guy installing them to crank those up to max on both brightness and color and that looks like the right settings for the space and what I use it for.

I think I need to write some more tests. I've got a set of 3 features that individually work perfectly, but when combined, not so much. It's better than it was and close enough to right that it's still usable, but I'm clearly not thinking about this quite right and it takes too long to set up the faulty conditions in live use.

Removed the green coffee from the coffee roasting area. That's not a sign that I'm going out of business. New lights are getting installed tomorrow morning and I just wanted the stuff out of the way and not have the risk of stuff falling into the bags. The old lights were salvaged from another shop before getting installed here 26 years ago so they're quite elderly now and probably not worth paying to repair instead of getting something slightly brighter, more efficient, and easier to clean.

Finally got around to downloading the last of the documents I need to send to my accountant for tax purposes. The package I get back every year is about the length of a small novel (though lower density than one that's any good) which is why I no longer do my own taxes.

Added some auto-recovery from temporary hardware disconnection/not connected at start. Needs some UI to alert the user to check their cables, but otherwise that's working now.

Did another super minor feature today in the very limited time available for coding. Implemented in 3 lines of code (1 each in 3 different files). The hard part is just remembering how I have things organized to know where best to put those lines.

Added the new Kenyan coffee to the shop's web site. Costa Rican coffee has temporarily been removed, but it'll be back soon. I had more of this on contract so it's hopefully just a slight delay while I wait for it to arrive from the warehouse and I'll be able to get that back up at the same price.

https://wilsonscoffee.com/

Onions in tonight's dinner are especially good.

New coffee from Papua New Guinea also turned out nicely, though this is a direct replacement for the previous lot of coffee from there and it's very similar. I'm not bothering to change the label on that one.

The new Kenyan coffee is pretty good. It's not the most intense and acidic Kenyan coffee I've brought in, but it is brighter than anything else I'm trying to sell at the moment. While not something I'm going to put on the label, about half way through the cup there's a neat passionfruit note in the aftertaste that I'm glad I was able to bring out. On yesterday's tasting it only came out briefly on a lighter cup that didn't really hold up well as the coffee cooled.

I've been doing this with every coffee I roast for over a quarter century now so I've gotten decently good at reasoning about what I can do to achieve the cup characteristics I want.

From there, I focus on tasting within that range until the coffee is cool and consider whether I want to pick something directly to attempt to replicate on the big roaster or if I think changing how much time I'm spending in key temperature ranges (roast faster or slower) might improve on what I'm tasting. Sometimes I need to go back to the little roaster to try something else, but I'm usually pretty confident that I can make an adjustment if needed and move directly into production testing.

The 2nd tasting goes in the opposite direction: darkest to lightest. Here I started to pick up on the characteristics I'm looking for at cup 7, but 6 was better than 7 and 5 was better than 6. This let me narrow the range of coffees I'm considering to the 2-5 range, all of which for this flight is something that I'd consider a light roast (cup number to darkness isn't fixed between flights. I pull more heavily in whichever regions I most expect to have what I want to get out of that coffee).

Then it's time to taste the coffees, lightest to darkest. My favorite on the first sip was cup 2 with some very nice complex fruitiness, but it's not enough for a coffee to only be great on the first sip.