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.

The first thing is average rate of change through the range. Very easy calculation. The other thing that I'm thinking is percent breakdowns which nobody should be doing with roasting data, but I've had some thoughts on how to make those metrics less trash so I'll implement a couple variations on that and see what users think about it.

Started adding some new features that I've been thinking about lately. I'd previously combined the batch timer display with some other secondary displays and changed the range timers to something with more information density. Now I'm thinking that multi-range display could sensibly be extended to include various other kinds of batch statistics where it's useful to show that separately for different parts of the roast. The easiest way to add that looks kind of ugly, but I'll make it work first.

Finally got the new coffees up for sale on the web site. I still need to update the wholesale list and get a sample out to a company that expressed interest in one of the new arrivals before I had it.

I kind of miss when there was a shop across the street that offered sewing lessons. We'd get people bringing their sewing machines into the shop to do their homework at the last minute before class.

Someone brought their mechanical typewriter to the shop today. It's been a while since I've heard that sound.

It would be nice if the parking cops would knock it off with the flashing lights when people could reasonably be trying to sleep. Of course, better still would be scrapping the idiotic ordinance they're currently abusing in a fundraising scam. I complained at politicians when I saw them pulling this nonsense last year.

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.