I want some coffee!

 ... is the itch you can't scratch. Our friends from Key West, collectively "conchscooter", are newly retired and free to roam as the mood strikes. They left the Benson area on the eve of the new year. They crossed the border at Naco, AZ/Naco, MEX and headed straight to the parking lot of a Sonoran winery for the night (!). Then they were off to the north end of the Sea of Cortez. But that area of the gulf of Baja is seriously cold so there was no chance for a swim in warm water. That forced a migration south till they finally found coastal water where they could swim without calling it a Polar Bear Party! So here they are in the south-of-the-border-Margaritaville enjoying the comfort of warm 90°F days and who knows how warm Pacific ocean water... about 1200 miles south of the border. Benson, AZ to Tenacatita, Jalisco, Mexico- 1,226 miles according to Google Yeah... a margarita. Jimmy Buffett would approve! The margarita & food were delivered to them on the beach- som...

 ... and I like it. I just roasted 7 lbs. of Organic Chiapas greens for us and a few others. No one is much interested in anything else and neither are we! I have to admit this has been the most consistent variety of greens I've found in nearly 20 years of roasting. So far Coffee Bean Corral has been able to maintain a stock of them but I live in fear of having them go away. I *can't* be the only one that is hooked on this variety! I was curious what the facility looked like so I poked around with Google Maps and managed to find a street level image- Not at all what I expected. I figured it would be a building about like what they have here but stuck in some industrial area. I think I could enjoy the drive to work each day in a place like this! Good on you Coffee Bean Corral !

... in Bisbee. Well... in the Lowell district. Lowell was once a separate town next to Bisbee but as the mines closed there was consolidation in order to survive. Bisbee was once a major mining center for all sorts of things but is best known today as the site of the Lavender open pit mine. The huge site is still just as it was when abandoned decades ago. The Lavender pit mine The pit was mined till it's closure in 1975. It is 900 ft deep from the parking lot elevation to the lowest point. During its day they extracted 76,000,000 tons of ore from the pit. Not of much use to anyone today, the pit is now just a hole in the ground. When I knew that the adventurers and recent custom-built van owners Michael & Layne were arriving I wanted to be sure they saw something more interesting than the re-enactment of the gun fight at the OK Corral in Tombstone. Lots of choices here in AZ (first stop was Mi Casa in Benson for lunch!) but they had just been toured around Tucson by Layne's...

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.