#Coffee bean container software

I don’t want to interact with the storage unit itself to change the data, and I also don’t want to plug stuff in.I did not want to affix anything to the containers themselves, I wanted to be able to throw them into water for cleaning.I like the Fellow Atmos vacuum canisters, and I wanted to use them. I had no interest in designing my own container.In detail, the ideas and requirements I had were:

#Coffee bean container software

So, my plan was to develop both software and hardware to solve this: an application that allows me to keep track of all the beans I ever consume, and a nice solution for using that data to have my storage containers labeled. So clearly, this solution wasn’t working! I also screwed up my data more than once by trying to edit this large spreadsheet on a tiny touchscreen display, and I had a desync issue between my spreadsheet, the dry-erase board, and reality more than once. What do you do if you have multiple batches of the same bean? How do you properly sync the data between devices and have it accessible and editable on both desktop computers and smartphones?Īt the time of writing this, I consumed 58 different beans, and all of them had one or more rows in my spreadsheet, and the number of columns was larger than I am willing to admit.

However, the problem with spreadsheets is that they become very messy when they contain a lot of data, and there is a lot of potential for inconsistent data or just confusing states. I used to keep track of all this data in the way you would expect: inside a giant spreadsheet document, and I labeled my containers using a dry-erase marker. Eyeballing doesn’t work, and the values are different for each type of bean. Properly dialing in Espresso is a bit of a science itself, and once you’re done for a specific bean, it’s pretty much required to write those things down. Since I’m not only brewing drip coffee, but also pulling Espresso shots, I need a way to keep track of the right grind settings and brew ratios for each bean. Knowing which bean is in which container isn’t all there is to it, though. If you mix up storage containers, you’ll have a very confusing taste experience and maybe even a bad night. In most cases, there is at least one decaf coffee and two different regulars - usually one naturally processed and one washed coffee, just for some variety. But that’s not all! I usually have more than one kind of bean “ready for consumption”. Keeping track of which beans are currently in any given state and for how long is a bit of a challenge all by itself. You can prolong the life of your beans significantly by freezing them after the degassing period, but then you somehow have to keep track of what beans are currently inside your freezer, when they went into the freezer, … However, after that, you want to consume the beans within a month or so, or they’ll lose a lot of their finer flavors. During roasting, a lot of CO 2 builds up inside the beans, so you want to give them two to four weeks to degas after roasting. You want your coffee to be fresh, but it’s actually possible for beans to be too fresh to consume. Things become a lot more complicated as soon as you buy fresh, lightly roasted specialty coffee beans. Buying and consuming those super dark roasts from the shelves of your local supermarket is easy. One thing that always feels more complicated than it should be is the logistics around handling coffee beans. Having coffee as a hobby is fun: you get to taste delicious things, and there are endless possibilities for overengineering every single aspect of it, so what’s there not to love. As you can tell from the title of this post, I am very far in the latter category. Amongst the people who consume it, there are three groups: those who drink it for the caffeine, those who drink it for the taste, and those who make coffee their hobby.