Roast #14: 2022 Year-end wrap up
It was a hard one, but a good one.
This is a photo dump of some memorable moments this year. I’ll try and keep the text short.
Enjoy.
January:
This was what @thoughtfulcoffee mainly consisted of early in January. The idea behind this was to try and post insightful content to try and build an audience. This was a good start, as it pushed me to read coffee books and papers to generate these little snippets. Unfortunately, this process was tedious and did not garnish the success I had hoped for, so I moved on from it.
February:
This was when I bought my Aillio Bullet R1 V2 roaster. You can see most of my roaster setup here. This marked the start of my roasting journey. I decided to turn to coffee roasting as I realized I had to make a mark toward my goals, as my current approach, posting coffee fact snippets, wasn’t working. Plus, I rationalized the purchase by realizing that if I were drinking 2 cups a day for five days a week while buying coffee priced at $25 for 250g, I’d make my money back in 3 years time! 😅
March:
This was the beginning of the coffee club idea. This was a tester post to see if there was any interest in a coffee club.
April:
This was the first time I shared my coffee with strangers/people I didn’t know. The rationale behind this was I had extra coffee, and I wanted to share it with others so they didn’t go to waste.
Putting the box out there was nerve-racking. I was lightweight scared that nobody was going to take any. Fortunately, that was not the case.
May:
This was when I played leaderboard, and placed well in the standings. Leaderboard is a coffee game where they send you 10 coffees and you have to figure out details about each coffee.
For that season, I was 4 points from making it to that season 6’s “leaderboard”. I was in the mix with actual coffee professionals (“Pro”). This was a big confidence booster for me at the time.
June:
This was my first big boi coffee greens purchase. I really wanted to get this bean as coffee this fermented is extremely rare.
This buying experience led me down the path of doing more large coffee green purchases and then selling the extra poundage to other people. Maybe a coffee exporter, as you will (just kidding).
July:
This was when coffee club V1 went live. I sold out within hours. Though the quantity I had available was teeny, but by the end of the day, I ended up building a waitlist for coffee club V2.
I felt ecstatic that people were actually interested, and frightened that there was no turning back.
August:
This was when coffee club V1 happened. I paired every box with the option for someone to take away a home-brewed cold brew. I also decided to take photos of people holding the boxes for social media purposes.
That weekend was quite hectic. For each dropoff, I’d carry a camera, a coffee box, and a cold brew in my hands as I would run down flights of stairs to make the dropoff. It felt surreal that I was delivering something to people.
September:
This was my first time actually sampling coffee. This was another “big boi” moment as I was doing what coffee professionals were doing. I remember spending hours researching how to “sample coffee”, making sure I knew what I was doing to not waste any of 100 grams of coffee I had.
This process ended up with me making the biggest increment of coffee (50lbs) worth.
October:
This was when I did some traveling to Europe, and I was able to get a glimpse at how the cafe/coffee scene is over there.
This was also my first… entry into the world of espresso? After this trip, I became resolved to buy an at-home espresso machine.
November:
This was when we released coffee club V2. I did some things differently, and I made a lot of progress in improving the product.
The interest and results of the second box was motivating for me to keep going. I had repeat customers!
December:
This was from an in-person cupping event that I held with @obscurecoffeeroasters. We are part of a discord group of coffee enthusiasts in NYC, and this tasting event was the first big “server” event.
I had a lot of fun, and it was just super cool to serve my coffee in a more real-time environment. I got to see people’s expressions and reactions to my coffee.
Final thoughts:
2022 was a hard but good year. I made many bad decisions, but I’m glad not coffee roasting wasn’t one of them. Confusing, I know.
But yeah — I hope I can carry this momentum forward into 2023 and that I’ll be able to grow this project a little bit bigger.
To finish, I want to say thank you. I can’t say this enough, but I couldn’t have gotten here without everyone’s help and support.
Cheers to closing out 2022, and a better 2023.