Every year around this time, the cups turn orange, the chalkboards get a seasonal font, and a drink shows up that has almost nothing to do with coffee: pumpkin spice latte. Every year I have the same reaction: amusement with a small amount of despair mixed in. It happens everywhere, and here in Tokyo, where seasonal flavors are close to a competitive sport, it happens harder than in most places.
Let me be precise about what bothers me, because it is not the pumpkin. I have no quarrel with squash.
The espresso in there has a job, and the job is not flavor
Look at what actually goes into a pumpkin spice latte. Sweetened spice syrup, usually built on cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, and ginger, carried by a serious amount of sugar. Steamed milk, which is already sweet on its own. Often topped with whipped cream, then more spice dusted on top. Somewhere underneath all of it, a shot of espresso.
So ask yourself what that shot is contributing. It brings caffeine. It brings a bit of bitterness so the whole thing does not read as pure dessert. That is the entire brief. Every delicate thing coffee can do - the florals, the acidity, the fruit, the way a clean roast finishes - gets painted over by clove and sugar somewhere in the first sip.
As beverage design, that is fine. As a use of coffee, it is a waste.
The syrup is an excellent hiding place
Here is the part that gets me. If you wanted to disguise stale beans, a scorched roast, or a badly pulled shot, you could not design better cover than sugar and clove. Strong sweetness and strong spice forgive almost everything. Flavored coffee beans play the same trick, just earlier, at the roastery.
Which makes the seasonal drink the one item on the menu where bean quality matters least. Think about that for a second. The most talked about coffee of the year is the one where the coffee is least likely to be good.
If you order it because you love coffee, you have been misled
This is the honest core of my complaint. If you drink pumpkin spice lattes because you enjoy the taste of coffee, I promise you are not tasting coffee. You are tasting spiced sugar with a warm milky body and a faint bitter edge underneath. That edge is the only part coffee is responsible for, and you could get it from almost any bean on earth.
You did not fall in love with coffee. You fell in love with a dessert that happens to be served in a coffee shop. Those are different relationships.
So go ahead and drink it
I am not trying to take it away from you. Order it, enjoy it, get the whipped cream. Autumn is good, dessert is good, warm sweet things in cold weather are one of the better parts of being alive.
My only request is a small one about naming. Call it what it is. It is a spiced dessert drink with caffeine in it, and there is nothing wrong with that. When you tell me you love coffee and what you mean is that you love this, we are having two different conversations, and neither of us realizes it.
What to drink if you want cozy and coffee at the same time
Here is the useful part. If what you actually want in September is warmth, sweetness, and something that smells like spice, you can have all of it without burying the coffee.
Change the bean instead of the syrup. Plenty of coffees taste like warm spice with no help at all. A darker roasted Brazilian or a Sumatra tends to run chocolatey, nutty, and earthy. Natural process coffees often come across as sweet and fruity on their own. Look at the tasting notes on the bag and pick one that already goes where you want to go.
Put real spice in with the grounds. A broken cinnamon stick in the French press, or a few grates of nutmeg over the bed in your filter, gives you the aroma without the sugar. You get to control how loud it is, which you never can with a pump of syrup.
Order a cortado instead of a latte. Less milk means less room to hide, and the sweetness you get comes from the milk itself rather than a bottle. If your café pulls a good shot, this is where you will notice.
Sweeten quietly if you sweeten at all. A little honey or maple stirred into the milk sits underneath the coffee instead of on top.
Drink it fresh. Whole beans, ground right before you brew. This is not seasonal advice; it is just the thing that improves every cup you make.
The orange cups will be gone by December and replaced by something peppermint. Coffee will still be here in January, in April, and the year after that. It is worth getting to know it properly.
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