I want some coffee!

Wednesday worked out as a good day to do some roasting and I managed to get through 7.3 lbs of green beans. 7.3 lbs of greens translates into 6 lbs of roasted coffee which is enough to keep the coffee drinkers we know from having caffeine withdrawals.  6 lbs ready to go plus a spare plus a pound of Liquid Amber for Will Roasting these recent 6 pounds of coffee was the easiest roast session I've ever had. The new Recipe for these organic beans from Chiapas, Mexico makes it a breeze! Went very smoothly and each roast ended as expected instead of the frequent 'anyone's guess' I often encounter. And this current lot of Organic Chiapas from Mexico (via Coffee Bean Corral in Jackson, MS) is still a remarkable favorite. It's so good I've stopped roasting anything else. And that appears to be pretty much the opinion of the others I'm sharing this with. So today or tomorrow the Admiral will drop off a few chocolate Santas as Christmas treats and I'll deliver cof...

Life has been a little off balance for this scribe. Rehab continues to demand the focus of most of my activity by either demanding I get ready to go to the clinic or return and try to remember what I was supposed to be doing or do the exercises I'm required to do daily. On top of that we changed 'laundry day' back in August from Thursday to Tuesday cuz we had run out of clothes when we returned from our brief trip to New Mexico and that discombobulated everything that requires repetition. Take your pick for a cause- it requires very little for a person who needs daily repetition to maintain a habit to keep it from falling to the wayside.  And the exercise from rehab must absolutely not be tossed aside. According to the Admiral my posture is actually improving a little and I'm walking further. When I started rehab in early Dec I was able to walk about 1/4 mile max. Michael-the-rehab-tech told me to start increasing that distance so I gave it a try on Friday morning (16 D...

I just roasted a bunch of coffee. To try to keep the roasts consistent using what RT3 (the roasting software) refers to as Recipes. Recipes are a set of button pushing commands to the roaster that can be based upon Time (the default) or Temperature AND Time (that's the logical AND meaning both). They provide consistency that seems to be lacking when I just follow the button pushes of an earlier roast. Easy-peasey. But the results have been inconsistent and I end up with roasts that have a graph that varies a lot. And I mean a lot . Thru some odd accumulation of good fortune I did a roast that seemed to have all the right shapes to the curves that are recorded during the roast. At the same time I needed to answer a few questions from the software developer about how the Recipe feature works in RT3. So... I decided to create a new version of the Recipe using the roast that had come out *looking* like I wanted. But instead of using the in-built roast-to-recipe conversion which is mech...

... and it was a good thing too. The Admiral had gotten us some Starbucks Verona (our old favorite) which did not live up to our recollection of 'favorite'.  So on 20 November I managed to do 6 roasts of 1# each in the bag. 'In the bag'? Green beans lose about 17% of their weight during the roast so I have to roast more green beans in order to end up with 1# 'in the bag'.  I was relieved it came out great and we both were pleased to have the Chiapas from Mexico back in our morning cup. I'm the only one that cares about the nerdy side of roasting but since it's my blog I'll include the roast graph... I was really pleased with the shape of the curves so I translated this last roast of the day into a Recipe. The Recipe is a set of instructions used in RoasTime software (supplied by Aillio at no charge) that does the button-pushing for you. Hopefully I will be able to replicate this roast for this particular variety of beans.

I'm still among the living. Visited the San Pedro Clinic on Friday and Sean says the chest X-rays came back fine. No surprises hidden away. And the blood work is better than I've ever seen. Wow! Guess the Admiral is doing everything right to keep me going. My plan was to get a few roasts done today but emergency repairs got in the way. My poor old chair has been wobbling for the past year and threatens to unseat me each time I try to sit. [ Mmm... kinda contradicts 'emergency' doesn't it? ]  So after the morning walk (wow! 6 days in a row!) I stopped at Ace and bought some glue, made a proper mess of smearing it in all the wrong places and set the errant leg out in the sun. But the recommendation is to wait 24 hrs before messing with the joint so it looks like tomorrow before I can put the chair back together. Of course I forgot to get the 'before' but here's the 'after'. The lower threaded insert (on the left in the photo) had backed out and wa...

 I had wanted to say in the previous post that a persistent cough has taken its toll of coffee roasting. In fact I'm about a day away from opening a bag of Starbucks Verona- the first we've had to buy in years. Verona is not penance by any means. I recall enjoying Verona a lot. It's a dark roast which has been consistent over the years. And we have always been able to find it wherever we travel in the US. But the Admiral and I have become very attached to our morning cup of Chiapas from Mexico. I have a recent purchase from Coffee Bean Corral so I'm good to go for maybe 15 or more roasts. The issue has been my persistent dry cough. I wasn't sure what that was about so I went to the PA (physician's assistant) at San Pedro Clinic. He ordered some chest X-rays and blood work. I'll see him Friday and see what he thinks. I think the answer is going to be 'you've got the bug that's been going around' but at this point who knows? If I do in fact hav...

 ... it's not over.  Fall has been something of an oddity this year as it slides day-by-day in a gradual decline of daily high temp from 90s to 80s and now the 70s with 60s in the forecast for next week. It has been a fall like no other we've experienced over our roughly 13 years here in San Pedro Valley and specifically Benson. Something that hasn't changed is the irritating nature of healthcare in Benson. When we first arrived in Benson there was a clinic on 4th street called San Pedro Family Care. The clinic is still here but the 2 doctors that ran the place, Carter and Andy Mayberry, have sold the practice to the local hospital. But neither brother is willing to work for the hospital and have instead gone to Chiricahua Clinic across from the hospital.   San Pedro Clinic in Benson So the issue is there are no doctors at San Pedro clinic. They currently have a PA (physician's assistant) and 3 nurse practitioners. They had a doctor but she left Arizona to travel to Flo...