Introducing HexRoast Field Notes: A Lighter Companion Blog

A few weeks ago we noticed a writing problem. Half the things we wanted to publish on HexRoast didn't fit the site we were building. The site you're reading wants to be the main shelf — long-form, technical, considered. Flagship pieces. The brewing science. The build-in-public reports. Things you'd reasonably bookmark.

But we kept wanting to write shorter things too. A two-paragraph note about a grinder I broke. A quick review of a café in Oakland. A snapshot of what I drank during last night's deploy. None of that belongs in the journal here — it would dilute the signal. But none of it is worth throwing away, either.

So we made a second site for it. It's called HexRoast Field Notes, and it lives at hexroastlogs.blogspot.com.

/ 01What goes where

The split is intentional and we plan to keep it clean. Here is the editorial line:

/ 02Why a separate site instead of a blog folder

Reasonable question. The honest answer has three parts.

// 02.1Different writing voice, different platform

The Field Notes posts have a different rhythm. They're personal, sometimes self-deprecating, often half-finished thoughts. Putting them on the main site, surrounded by 11-minute technical breakdowns, would have either forced them to grow up or dragged the journal down. Giving them their own home means we can write looser there and tighter here.

// 02.2Blogger has SEO advantages we wanted

Blogger is a Google product. New posts on a Blogger domain get crawled fast — sometimes within an hour. For a brand that's still trying to get found, that crawl speed is genuinely useful. Field Notes is targeting different keywords than the main site (more casual, more entry-level long-tails) and we wanted them to rank without competing with our own pages here.

// 02.3Two surfaces beat one

If you only know us through the main site, you might check it once a month. If you also follow Field Notes, you might check that weekly. Two surfaces give two reasons to come back, and that turns out to matter more than we expected for a brand with no advertising budget.

/ 03What's already over there

The first three Field Notes are live now:

/ 04How to follow both

If you only have time for one, pick based on how you read:

• If you read monthly, in long sessions, with coffee, and want technical depth — stay on this site and join the waitlist. We email when major pieces drop.
• If you read daily, in short bursts, and want lighter coffee writing in your feed — follow Field Notes. New posts roughly twice a week.
• If you want both — same. The waitlist covers the journal. Field Notes has its own RSS at hexroastlogs.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.

/ 05What this means for build-in-public reporting

We'll continue running the BIP series here. The next BIP report (Month Three, due in mid-May) will include traffic and engagement numbers from both sites. We're curious how a Blogger sister site performs against a custom-domain main site — particularly on Google rankings, on referral traffic between the two, and on whether Field Notes readers convert to waitlist signups at a similar rate to direct main-site visitors.

If you want to see those numbers when we publish them, the waitlist is where the next BIP report will land first.

Thanks for being early. We'll see you on both shelves.