It's been longer than I would like here without an update, especially with so much happening. We had a busy Christmas season (thank you) and these notes fell by the side. Hopefully all of you who live in the area will show up on New Year's Day (between 10AM and 4PM) for our annual Happy Brew Year fundraiser for Coffee Kids. All tips and drink sales on January 1 will be donated to Coffee Kids.
We are presently out of a few coffees. Ethiopian Yirgacheffe Hama Gold is gone. We intend to replace it with Ethiopian Yirgacheffe Konga Natural from the latest eCafé auction, but there have been a few snags in getting it out of Ethiopia. The story went from the coffee being at port waiting for the next vessel to the export papers not being in order with Willem Boot in Ethiopia cupping the coffees and trying to straighten things out. From my reply, "[H]ow do we go from coffee being at port waiting for the next vessel to Willem being in Ethiopia cupping it?" The next update indicated that Sidamo Union was in control of the lots and for some unspecified reason was not releasing them for export. Another eCafé board member was in Ethiopia trying to correct this. Finally, a bit before Christmas, I learned that Sidamo Union has agreed to release the coffees to Yirgacheffe Union and there was hope that the coffee, which should have been available for sale here back in November, would finally leave Ethiopia by the end of the week. I have not yet heard of this happening.
I don't intend to cast blame anywhere with this update as I am not directly involved. It has been frustrating for all concerned parties. Buyers such as myself don't have the coffee, have missed the Christmas season, and with each passing week have less time in which to sell the coffee. The eCafé board members are spending time (without compensation) attempting to fix problems that are outside of thier control. The cooperatives that produced these fantastic lots have not gotten the final payment.
I remember hearing while I was in Ethiopia in February Willem telling a story about a conversation that took place when the first competition and auction was being organized. He cautioned the Ethiopians that sometimes these auctions fail. The Ethiopian response was if that happened, they would drink the coffee themselves. Indeed, Ethiopia has a rich coffee drinking culture and while I would not roast an Ethiopian coffee as dark as the custom is there, I was not served a single bad cup in the two weeks I was there. If this program fails, however, it will not be due to prices bid at auction or problems with the quality of the coffee. I hope existing problems can be resolved and the program improved for future years. I am getting the impression that eCafé board members intend to do that, but it remains to be seen if buyers will still be interested next year and if cooperatives will have enough confidence in the program to send such amazing lots. I hope both of these groups will see reasons to try this again in the future.
We are also out of Yemen Mocha Sanani. The story here is much less interesting. The last time I called our supplier for this coffee, the new crop was not yet in the country. Due to this temporary unavailability, we are also out of Mocha Java blend.
Tanzanian AAA is nearly gone. We are having some difficulty finding Tanzanian coffees that meet or exceed the level of quality we expect.
That just leaves Kenya, however we did find a very nice Kenya Peaberry to replace our Kenya AA. This came down to deciding between a Kenya AA that cupped nearly the same as our previous Kenya AA and the peaberry we picked which was more interesting in the cup and was a little sweeter. Naturally, we picked the coffee that we thought tasted the best and bought five of the 21 bags in the lot.
Holiday Blend had a short season this year, though the blend of Sulawesi and El Salvador was well recieved. Wholesale customers will be able to continue ordering this for a while and I am considering coming up with a new name and keeping it around for a while.
Decaffeinated Ethiopian sold much faster than expected, so this may be unavailable for a while.
Another coffee that we will not have for a while is decaffeinated Kenyan. Decaffeinated Kenyans are tricky. Sometimes they are really good, and sometimes the quality just does not come through. This was one of my two favorite decafs (along with the Sumatra which we still have a good supply of) so please try it in the limited time it is available. We brought in a very nice decaffeinated Tanzanian to replace this.
Timor Peaberry will soon be unavailable, but I expect to have another coffee from East Timor soon.
I opened a new lot of Sumatra Mandheling recently. In the development cupping I found a sample that matched the previous lot perfectly. Unfortunately, this did not translate to a drip preparation. It smelled great, but tasted awful. I made note of some other samples that were good and used this along with how the first attempt tasted to develop a different profile. This second attempt, taken just a few degrees hotter and elongating the time spent between 300 and 330 and between 380 and 430 degrees, resulted in a slightly sweet, slightly earthy full bodied Sumatra very similar to the previous lot.
The rest of this entry is not really about coffee, so those uninterested in software development may want to stop now.
For years I've had a dual digital timer clipped to the roaster. One timer counted how long the roaster had been on (this is tracked for maintenence scheduling) and the other kept track of time for the current batch. This timer was failing frequently toward the end, resetting itself at random. Replacing the battery did not correct this problem.
Clearly, not having a working timer is unacceptable, so I started to look for a new one only to find that such a device is not available in Racine. I could probably find such a thing online, but I decided that this would be a trivial thing to have my laptop do.
Implementing a timer is very simple with Qt. I tried the obvious first, using a QLCDNumber widget for display and a QTimer to control it. This is not the most trustworthy way to go for accuracy, but testing it demonstrated that it lost about one second per six hours compared to my old timer and that's good enough for my intended use. To make my timer widget more useful on its own, I put in some KActions available from a context menu for starting, stopping, and resetting the timer, as well as for selecting among count up, count down, and clock modes. It also sends signals when it starts, stops, or changes and I'm playing with using this to drive an indicator over a graph of a roast profile and having these on the laptop as well to give me fewer things to pay attention to during a roast.
For standalone use I stuck my timer widget into a layout with Start, Stop, and Reset buttons and set that as the top widget in a KApplication. It should all work with KDE 3 libraries, but I've only tested it against a KDE 4 SVN checkout (and I'll need to make some minor changes due to recent changes there). At some point I'll put the source code out there for anybody who wants to play with it (along with other roasting tools that are still in development) but the timer application is really a trivial little program, easily reconstructed with this description, the Qt and KDE documentation, and about an hour coding. It might be useful as a tutorial for KDE and Qt application development. I just need a place to host it.