Blonde roast: Something different

The blog has now become all-encompassing—a lumbering, disquieting lamprey that has slowly sucked all hope and joy from my life and left a shell of a man in its wake. On a more positive note, I did eat half a jar of buttercream frosting after dinner, and that was pretty good.  But now not even the promise of sleep can provide respite from this blog, and last night I dreamt I wrote a blog post after designing my own special drink at Starbucks. In theory, it sounds like I perhaps constructed a beverage worthy of the so-called secret menu—clandestine drink recipes of which only the most serious of Starbucks devotees are even aware—but in practice my dream just went like this:

Me: I’d like a coffee, please.

Barista: OK. Is there anything you’d like us to add to your coffee?

Me: Bacon bits.

I was even crafting sentences about the saltiness of the bacon bits complementing the bitter coffee flavor before the drink had even arrived. But when I finally sipped the drink, it had no taste.

And then I woke up.

I don’t know what this dream means, but I’ll interpret it on a practical level as saying that I need to take a break from blogging pretty soon.  

But not quite yet, gentle reader!  

Yesterday and then again this morning, I went into Starbucks and ordered the blonde roast.  I asked the manager several hard-hitting questions about the differences between the various roasts, which he expertly answered. But then I totally forgot everything he said and I went home and watched some movie about a British prostitute on the Lifetime network.  The takeaway in all of this, however, is that Starbucks has multiple roasts of their coffee, and the blonde roast is different from most other coffees I have had in the past.  This particular roast has a light fruitiness to it that makes it easy to sip and which, as far as I can tell, is absent in other Starbucks coffee varieties. 

Yesterday I had it with heavy cream and today I had it black and then later with half-and-half.  All of the variations were great. 

There’s a Starbucks barista who has given me several money-saving tips that one can employ at Starbucks and she’s probably saved me a couple hundred dollars at this point. To be fair, I’m pretty sure I just reinvested these savings back into Starbucks over the past three weeks while making this blog, but that’s life. 

One particularly useful tip she gave me this morning is that Starbucks offers free refills on their coffees and cold brew (not the espresso-based drinks) when one stays in the store.

Now that I’ve discovered the blonde roast, I might never leave.

Verdict: A fruity almost nutty variety of coffee and certainly worth a try.

Score: Seven Stars and six Bucks out of 10.