Month: June 2024

LCRC Beach Blend

lpaulriddle
  • Beans: “Beach Blend” from Local Coffee Roasting Co. (Roxana, DE)
    • Roast level: Light
    • Origin: Ethiopia/Colombia
    • Tasting notes from web site: milk chocolate/strawberry
    • Roast date: 5/27/2024
    • Purchase date: 6/17 or 6/18/24 at Three Blonde Bakers in Bethany Beach, DE
  • V60:

I bought an 8oz bag of these and an 8oz bag of “Delaware Blend” in Bethany last week, but waited until I was home to open them so I could use my pour-over setup. Nice, strong cup this morning with low acidity for a light roast. There’s definitely a slight hint of fruit. When I brew my next cup (likely tomorrow) I’ll pay more attention and see if it reminds me of strawberries as advertised. 😀

Delaware Paddling Report

lpaulriddle

I managed to get out paddling 3 times during my recent trip to Bethany Beach, DE, all in under 48 hours!! Here are some quick notes.

Delaware Breakwater East End Lighthouse: Launch is in Cape Henlopen State Park right next to the fishing pier. Need to go early-ish in the morning to avoid bad traffic through Rehoboth. $10/vehicle entry fee for out-of-state tags, paid at an automated kiosk (credit card only). We put in around 8:00am, near high tide. Total paddle was only around 2.5 miles, but lots to see along the way: dolphins, horseshoe crabs, an osprey with chicks, Lewes-Cape May Ferry route a short distance away, and (of course) the lighthouse. Water was nice and calm behind the breakwater, with occasional minor chop from boat wakes and breeze. There were a fair number of people out on the water: a few fishing boats, a whole bunch of kayaks (a few people fishing, and what appeared to be a sightseeing tour). We were able to disembark on the breakwater, walk up to the lighthouse, and find a geocache that was hidden there. It’s not for the faint-hearted, though: there is nowhere to easily tether the boats, so we roped them together and took turns. All in all, a very memorable outing. It would be a great place for sea kayaking.

Savage Ditch: This is north of Bethany about a mile past the Indian River Inlet Bridge. We came here in the evening. This is also $10/vehicle for out-of-state, paid at an honor box. I missed the launch at first and tried to follow the trail past the picnic pavilion, which was a mistake. It does go to the water, but it’s several hundred feet, and the bugs were fierce. I was swatting them the entire way, and picked up two ticks. My son found the actual launch, which is a much shorter carry and somewhat less buggy, but the put-in is on the muddy side. Once on the water, though, it was quite nice. We saw tons of gulls, lots of water turtles, and a few egrets, terns, and ducks. We didn’t paddle too far since it was close to dusk. The sunset was very nice, as was the near-full moon. Next time, I won’t forget the DEET.

Trap Pond State Park: After years of hearing people rave about this place, we finally decided to check it out. It is about a 40 minute drive from Bethany with light traffic, or 45-50 minutes with heavy beach traffic. Unfortunately, the trip was kind of a bust, as the water level was extremely low to accommodate emergency repairs to the dam. As a result, most of the really cool places to paddle were inaccessible due to shallow water. Had I done my homework ahead of time, we probably would have taken a pass this year. All the same, we did get a couple miles of paddling in, and we saw some really cool bald cypress trees. We will come back here at some point when things are back to normal.

Amity Costa Rica (Terrazu)

lpaulriddle
  • Beans: “Costa Rica (Terrazu)” from Amity Coffee Roasters (Greenwood, DE)
    • Roast level: Medium (wet process)
    • Origin: Costa Rica
    • Tasting notes from bag: clean sweetness / floral
    • Roast date: 6/11/2024
    • Purchase date: 6/16/2024 at T S Smith & Sons in Bridgeville, DE
  • AeroPress:
    • 20-21g coffee / 250g water
    • JX: 18 (54 clicks)
    • Hot water from Cuisinart machine (pretty hot but not boiling)
    • Prismo with metal and paper filters
    • Pour to 250g and stir 6-7x; steep until 2:45; stir 6-7x; press slowly, finishing up somewhere around 4:15

I have brewed this recipe 5 or 6 times now at our beach house, and the cups have been pretty consistently good. I’ll almost certainly be bringing some home, so I’ll try it in the V60 next week and see how that compares.

6/28: At home, I’ve been using the same recipe with my gooseneck kettle and 95°C water. The past few cups have been very slightly bitter. I tried dropping the temperature to 90°, but it still was not quite as good as last week’s cups. I only had about 30g of beans left, so today, I brewed all of them with the V60 (size 2) and 450g of water at 95°, and I also backed the grind off 6 clicks to setting 20. The result was a very good, smooth cup. Seems that making the grind slightly coarser is the ticket with these beans as they start to age. They were only 17 days past roast date when I used them up.

lpaulriddle.com re-architecting

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I needed to get lpaulriddle.com moved off an old EC2 instance running Ubuntu 16.04, which has been EOL since 2021. About a year ago, I started the process by moving all of the services to Docker containers. Then I moved all of the persistent data (web pages, images, etc) to a EFS filesystem, and I moved my MariaDB database to RDS. After that, I kind of forgot about it until just recently. I saw that AWS was doing a promotion for its new t4g.small instances for 750 free compute hours per month through 2024, so I spun one up and worked on moving the services over. It went more smoothly than I had expected. This is what I did:

  1. Installed Docker and docker-compose on the new instance
  2. Tweaked AWS security groups to allow the new instance to mount the EFS filesystem and connect to the RDS database
  3. Copied my Github ssh credentials over to the new instance
  4. Cloned my Git repo to the new instance
  5. Copied secrets (.env) into the git tree
  6. Built all of my images (docker-compose build)
  7. Started containers (docker-compose up -d) – I actually did these one at a time, but this would have worked as well
  8. Tested everything out by modifying my /etc/hosts file
  9. Disassociated my elastic IP address from the old EC2 instance and assigned it to the new instance

This all went off without a hitch, and everything seems to be working. Functionally, the new instance is ARM vs x64, and the OS is Amazon Linux 2023, which is yum based, vs Ubuntu, which is based on apt/dpkg. This post will serve as a test that I can create blog posts using the new infrastructure.

Next, I think I’m going to move my database off RDS and back onto a MariaDB container with the database in EFS. RDS has turned out to be a little bit pricier than I had expected, and I think it’s overkill for my rather modest needs (basically a single WordPress blog and a MediaWiki instance).