Chapter 3: Man Down!

As written in our April 2021 Newsletter

If you have been following along on our journey into the bottomless coffee pot, you’ll recall last month I shared about our beautiful new coffee roaster and how Everette was at death’s door. Ok maybe that’s a bit melodramatic, but you weren’t the one whose head, shot off of the pillow every time his whole body heaved with a wracking cough in the middle of the night. Luckily I’ve read a thousand books where this happens in the wild frontier so I knew just what to do. Willow bark tea and heavy blankets to sweat the fever. Kidding! I shoved green tea, vitamin c, and bone broth down his throat.
The problem came a few days later when he was still feeling terrible and it was time to roast coffee. Ruh-roh. Guess who, at the time, had no idea how to roast coffee?
ME!
So Everette stumbled to the basement and roasted up some coffee. Don’t worry any germs that might have been hanging around were incinerated in the roaster and I handled all the coffee once it left the roaster. And trust me… I was spraying every surface with Lysol, essential oils, and vodka for good measure.
But we did realize it was probably time for me to learn to roast the coffee. My reluctance was only about the size young elephant.
Perhaps you remember Everette is extremely detailed methodical and… what’s a nice word for anal-retentive?
I call him The Spreadsheet Ninja. He has spreadsheets for everything. Vacation, truck purchases, the garden, and we have a running spreadsheet for Christmas gifts that goes back to 2011.
His attention to detail and love of spreadsheets are some of the things that I love and deeply appreciate about him. Because while I can, I do not often choose to make spreadsheets.
I am flexible and settle somewhere in between moderate planning to just-winging-it. Although I did have an elaborate file system for organizing the paint samples I collected at the hardware store as a kid. (Nerds attract Nerds). I’ve read a lot about coffee roasting in the last few years and I just have to say that no one told Everette that coffee roasting is considered an art and not a science. Because he definitely goes all sciencey on those beans. And, well, I am definitely more art-y than science-y.
So after a couple of conversations with my therapist (not a joke) and some serious time begging Jesus to keep our marriage intact (also not a joke) we made a list of procedures and went down to the Dungeon of Coffee Roasting Doom. Everette showed me all the spreadsheets and all the checklists that would make an airplane pilot tremble. Then he showed me again because his brain runs like a hamster on steroids trapped on a running wheel and my brain moves at the speed of sloth.
It took a few weeks and we had a few uhhh… intense discussions. To be fair it’s like talking over an industrial vacuum. But we finally got to a place where we both felt reasonably comfortable with me roasting. Aaand, we didn’t murder each other!!!
I secretly rejoiced because I figured now that I “knew” how to roast I could sit back and rest on my laurels. Turns out Everette had the audacity to go on a trip… without me, over the weekend when we roast.
So I was going to have to put on my big girl underpants and actually roast the coffee. By. myself. Without. Everette. He wasn’t even going to be in the state. He wasn’t even going to be reliably available by phone. Jerk.
Check back in next month to hear how my first solo roast went.

You don’t have to wait! You can read it here!