A freshness zealot.

A middle-aged fellow who I'd never seen before comes in a while back and he seems a little fidgety. I greet him "Good afternoon" and he doesn't answer me so I say again "Hello!" to which he glances at me and offers a rather disinterested "hi." He's looking around furtively and distractedly, as though he's looking for something specific but can't find it. He goes over to the brew pots lined up on the counter, peers down over the top of his glasses and seems to be quickly reading the labels on the pots. He asks without looking at me "Which is your freshest coffee?" I reply "If you mean of these brewed coffees, they're all fresh. They were each brewed within the last hour or so and these brew pots are designed to keep them fresh and hot."

"I know, I know," he says, a little irritated. "But what's the freshest one, the one brewed last? I only drink fresh coffee and I can tell when it's not fresh."

"Well," I say, smiling a little, "I made this Colombian last, so it's maybe 7 or 8 minutes fresher than than the one before it. But as I said, they're all fresh and since they're each different coffees you will taste the differences of each one more than you will any difference in degree of freshness."

"Fresh coffee is everything. It's all that matters. I know coffee and I know fresh coffee from stale coffee. I'll know whether or not this is fresh." Now he's looking at me and I think he might realize that I'm not amused by his silly declaration that he can taste the difference in coffees brewed minutes apart from one another over the differences of origin and variety. I raise a slightly dubious eyebrow, ignore his implication that we might harbor stale coffee, and tell him that fresh coffee is what Stumpjack is all about, that we get small deliveries in once or twice a week for that very reason, so that nothing stays around for very long. "But," I say with a little sarcasm of my own, "if you can taste freshness that precisely...well, that's quite a sophisticated palate you've got there."

"Yes it is," he declares. "My palate is sophisticated." I'm not making this up...he really said that, out loud.

I hand him a cup, he pumps a little coffee into it, smells it and tastes it like he's tasting cheap wine (that is, rather perfunctorily), fills his cup and hands me $2.00. As I hand him his change I ask a little too cheerfully perhaps "Well, whaddya think?"

He doesn't look at me again and curtly says, as though it's a single word " 'tsgood" and walks right out.

I picture him getting in his car, a mid-70s station wagon, and taking out a well-worn notebook that lists all the coffee shops in the country, with columns on the right that are labeled "fresh" and "not fresh." He takes a stub of a pencil and mutters "damn" as he puts a check mark in the fresh column across from our name. Then he rides off down the road to other coffee shops in other towns, keeping a silent record of freshness that no-one will ever see.