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.

Made a big bowl of spicy chicken with rice.

cat

Installed extra RAM in my sister's new computer. Hers came with the SSD retaining screw on the unpopulated slot that mine was missing so I didn't have to give her one of my spares.

The five cups are all the same thing for this kind of cupping as that allows a uniformity score (do these all taste the same? If not, how many cups are different from the others?) and it gives a better chance of detecting if there are defects.

This one is pretty straightforward. I have an arrival sample on a coffee previously sold to me against a type sample and I'm just approving that yes, this is a close enough match to the type (the arrival sample is actually a little better than the type sample it was sold against).

I have a bunch of cupping spoons that the shop has purchased, but I never use them. Instead I use spoons that other people in the industry have given me over the decades.

More cupping.

There weren't a lot of people at the Aldi while I was there but apparently we all wanted eggs. I don't think I've ever waited in such a long egg line before.

The time is 2:26AM and the cat is requesting chin scritches.

UPS still thinks they're delivering my sister's computer on Wednesday, but it's close enough now that I wouldn't be surprised if it showed up tomorrow. I have everything at the shop already to upgrade that as soon as it arrives and she'll probably want to feed me a pizza after work while I help her get things set up software side.

Today's sensory work is a little more varied. Still some coffee tasting because someone labeled a bag in a way that cannot possibly be true (not customer facing) but also some egg nog tasting because stores in the area are not stocking enough egg nog.

Got the new coffees on the shop's web site along with holiday hours. Apologies to anybody who may be trying to reach me by email on my personal account. I haven't had the time to look at that for a few days now, but hopefully I'll be able to catch up on that over the weekend.

It seems that all my Texas customers are getting in their orders now. All the boxes I'm sending today and all the boxes from the previous 1-2 shipping days have all been going to Texas. Kind of wish someone would open a shop with my stuff in Austin so I could save these people some shipping (especially the people having me send chai concentrate which is crazy expensive to ship).

Test batch of the new coffee from Sumatra exceeds my expectation. Pushing that as dark as I did was the right call.

Working through production test batches and blend reworks today. So far things are coming out as expected.

The 8th and final coffee I'm working with today (cups 77-88) is very juicy, better on the light end. I wouldn't mind more intensity on the acidity for this one, but checking against the roasting data I don't think a profile change is likely to get me an improvement if I go for that.

For the 7th coffee I was hoping to do a couple different roasts, but the differences in cup character are so subtle across the tested range that there's no point. It seems to taste about the same no matter how you roast it (there are differences, but the intensity of flavors where those differences are detected is too low to try to build distinct products around).

The 6th coffee is going to need a profile adjustment to get what I want out of it, but what I want is definitely in the realm of the possible.

The 5th coffee had amazing fragrance running through the grinder. This is another one where you just kind of need to decide where you want to balance the cup as it was nice throughout the range I'm testing. This is one that I like to use in blends so I tried to keep that use case in mind while making the decision.

I wanted to get a couple things out of the 4th coffee. The lighter of the two roasts I hoped to get is pretty straightforward, but for the darker roast I'll need to make some profile adjustments instead of just replicating the product development batch to one of these end points.