Just when you thought coffee shop orders couldn’t get more irritating than extra hot, venti, soy, quadruple-shot lattes (minus the foam), Starbucks has kickstarted a new trend for magical, colour-changing versions of the Frappuccino, its popular blended coffee drink.
Last month, the chain unleashed the Unicorn Frappuccino – a limited-edition blue-and-pink drink available for just a week – in the US. Starbucks say the beverage starts off “sweet and fruity, transforming to pleasantly sour” and is “finished with whipped-cream-sprinkled pink and blue fairy powders”. Critics were less charitable, with one reviewer comparing it to fluoride mouthwash – albeit with 400 calories and 59g of sugar.
But because the Unicorn’s selling point perhaps wasn’t its taste but rather its looks, the Unicorn has already spawned its fair share of brightly coloured copycats. A Mermaid Frappuccino (green swirls instead of blue and pink) has been created by a Starbucks barista in Michigan who ran out of the dizzying list of ingredients needed for the original, so instead mixed a vanilla-bean base blended with freeze-dried blueberries and drizzled “a toasted coconut matcha sauce” over her creation. Elsewhere, other employees masterminded the Dragon Frappuccino (green tea Frappuccino with vanilla-bean powder and a berry swirl).
Mythical creatures aside, Starbucks fans’ thirst for novelty seems unquenchable, with “secret menu” items causing a stir in recent years. In reality this is less of a menu and more of a list of recipes you can plead with a busy barista to whip up. Liquid Cocaine, for instance, is four shots of espresso and four pumps of white chocolate syrup poured over a glass of ice. For coffee expert Will Corby, from subscription service Pact Coffee, the latest crimes against caffeine have left him torn. While he is broadly in favour of anything that introduces people to coffee – and coffee shops – he worries that frappes that do contain coffee are often “covering up delicious flavours that farmers have developed”.
“I want as many people to drink well-sourced coffee as possible because of the impact on people’s lives in producing countries,” he says. “But the part of me that loves the taste of coffee thinks these [frappes] are milkshakes with other flavours added.”
For coffee connoisseurs he has a third option. “You can have a delicious cold coffee drink that is just black coffee if you choose a really high-quality coffee. We have a coffee from Rwanda that tastes like blackcurrants – if you brew it over ice it is an instantly produced cold drink with masses of sweetness and the rich, fruity flavour that people are looking for when they add syrups.” Instagrammers will probably take a little more convincing.
