Welcome!

When I moved to Staunton, Virginia, the first job I landed was working at the local Starbucks. Over the course of the next year and a half or so of working there, I acquired a taste for coffee. I've since moved on from Starbucks, but in the past few weeks I've been mulling the idea of starting a blog dedicated to sharing whatever tastes and insights I can come across in my coffee drinking. My goal is to share my impressions and feelings about the coffee shops in and around Staunton. I'll also venture to review places when I travel to hopefully keep things fresh. I'll weigh in on the menu, atmosphere, price, employee awareness/friendliness/service, and of course, the coffee.

I should qualify this by saying I usually just drink black coffee. When I venture into the espresso world, I tend to stick to mochas and lattes. Along these lines I should state that my own dietary practices will limit the comprehensiveness of my reviews. Example: I'm a vegetarian, so while I hear that Coffee on the Corner has a killer Reuben, I won't be able to speak to it myself. In the same vein, I get my espresso drinks made with soy milk. So there's your warning.

In searching for a title I wanted to stick with a reference to a song or band. I landed on "Black Medicine," an ode to Fugazi's 1995 album "Red Medicine". Several summers ago, "Red Medicine" was my favorite album (the last four songs are borderline overwhelming, see "Long Distance Runner"). Unfortunately, I feel that in our time people's lives move too fast to slow down and enjoy the things around them. In the process, coffee becomes something more along the lines of Soma than something to savor. It's becomes more of a pill, a medicine, than anything else. The real shame is that this impairment extends far beyond coffee, and people's lives become a series of searching for their next dose of numbness. But, that's an issue for another day.

Along the way, let me know if you have thoughts or suggestions on how to make this blog flow a little better. Enjoy!