Pat

Pat's Space

So you're telling me that this coffee is thirteen years old?

Some of it is, the Professor said. Fascinating idea really.

…

The professor had been correct. the stuff was astonishing, incredible—like nothing he'd tasted before, and that was saying quite a bit. He was no slouch himself when it came to brewing coffee … Cap'n Binky's blend, however, held the aces. It was so rich as to be almost creamy, and there were a hundred unidentifiable flavors in it. Just when he'd come to the conclusion that is was almost chocolaty, he couldn't find any chocolate at all. And when it seemed, after the second sip, to resemble one of those dark stouts made with burnt barley, that flavor disappeared too, only to be replaced with the unmistakeable essence of strange spices.

This is the finest thing I've tasted, Jonathan told the waiting Binky; as he took another sip the faint promise of weedy river water appeared momentarily. Not in such a way that when he drank it he thought, this tastes like river water, but as a sort of strange, half-lost memory of wide, deep, cool rivers that mingled somewhere deep in his mind with the waters of the sea.