In those primitive times, there were only two types of coffee available in Tampa: American and Cuban. And only the former was served in the college cafeteria.

I spent many years drinking “engineers coffee,” so I’m probably not only at the low end of the curve on “coffee gourmet” scale, but off the chart entirely.

You could have stirred my coffee with a stalk of asparagus without me noticing it.

Anybody who is disturbed by the possible taste effect of a wooden stick while happily drinking commercial coffee stirred with a plastic stick out of a styrofoam cup(!!) is not really thinking about the issue.

I argued that we were not testing for “identicalness of coffees” we were testing for “presence of stick”. In fact, the two cups did not have to be identical, except for stirring method. One could have been coffee, the other tea. It was the unpleasant taste of the stick we were testing for, not whether or not the two cups were different. Even if there were unpleasant oils in the wood, it was irrelevant to the purpose of the experiment if they could not be detected by their taste.

But I was never able to convince my friend. What do you think?