Wednesday, June 11, 2003

Our stingy quasi-governmental agency does

Our stingy quasi-governmental agency does provide one important convenience - a beverage room on every floor with free coffee.  Sure, it’s not great coffee and I seem to have to brew it a disproportionate share of the time, but what the hell, I get it for free.  Most days I never venture farther from my desk than that coffee maker.  So I’m glad it’s there. 

The cool guy who runs purchasing for us, the big NRBQ head around the corner from my cube, set his sights on something more.  He put together a tasting this morning for all 200 of us in this building, with eight carafes of regular coffee labled “A” through “H” on conference tables laid out in a “U” shape, and a table full of cookies in the middle.  We got taster’s scoring sheets, little styro cups, and off we went.  Nothing was really good, though some were less bad than others.  I had to go back on occasion to realize, for example, that “G” didn’t really rate an “8” - it just followed “F”, which earned it’s ignominous place in the alphabet. 

There were several of us milling around conference rooms C-D munching biscotti and petit palmiers, comparing notes on eight regular and four decaf coffee options.  I was thinking in terms of body and mouth-feel, piquancy versus tartness, assertiveness versus acerbicness.  How the different intermezzo pastries affected my appreciation of different aspects of the java flavor spectra.  My whole gustatory vocabulary was wheeled out, polished up, and set in ready running order. 

I left it in neutral and limited myself to, “This one is yummy.” “Bitter.” “This is like water with a brown crayon in it.” (A sure crowdpleaser.) “I guess these ones are okay.” “I’m getting wired.” “Give me that cookie.” “She pushed me first.” “Put me down.”

I don’t remember how the rest of the tasting went; I woke up here at my chair with half a biscotti in my fist.  I wish I could have stuck around.  It looked like it was going to be interesting.