“Now the coffee itself began to have the power to confer some kind of status on the drinker,” White says. Until then, coffee status was less about the lousy swill in your cup than the place, with its sticky tables and din of philosophical chatter in a haze of cigarette smoke. The rise of specialty coffee and its affiliation with “rarified connoisseurship” arguably began in Berkeley in the 1960s, when Alfred Peet opened his first cafe using high-quality beans and manually calibrated roasting to brew a sweeter, less bitter cup. I think the latte falls into the snob category perhaps in that scenario.” “One is, why mess up a good cup of coffee? Another, which is a big thing in Massachusetts, is Starbucks versus Dunkin’ Donuts, or more broadly, this idea of the fake elite versus the fake working class. “There’s different kinds of thumbing your nose when it comes to coffee,” says Merry “Corky” White, a professor of anthropology at Boston University, who specializes in food and coffee. Of course, not everyone is so keen to debase their espressos with pumpkin spice or any other flavoring for a whole litany of reasons - some of which sprung out of the very same cafe culture that Starbucks helped usher in. Meanwhile, spinoff iterations continue sprouting on grocery shelves and backbars, and pumpkin spice season creeps up and up like a slow-moving pumpkin-pie-filling spill, to the point where Torani now has to ensure it has stock of pumpkin spice syrup as early as July. It’s now available in 50 countries worldwide, and as of 2019, CNBC reported that an estimated 424 million had been sold. The drink would spark an 11% jump in sales the following year and go on to be the company’s best-selling seasonal beverage of all time. The precursor to pumpkin spice, the pumpkin pie latte, had already appeared at a few coffee shops when a Starbucks product manager presented a prototype to the R&D team at the company’s headquarters in 2003. It’s hard to overstate how instrumental Starbucks was to the flavored latte’s rise.
He started experimenting until he’d concocted the first flavored latte out of steamed milk, espresso, and vanilla and orange syrups, which he called the Fantasia.
He asked owner and friend Giovanni “Papa Gianni” Giotta if he could take a few home to Portland, Ore., where he had an espresso machine. Per San Francisco-based syrup maker Torani, a retired coffee industry veteran named LC “Brandy” Brandenburg walked into North Beach’s Caffe Trieste in 1982 and glimpsed the Torani flavored syrup bottles lining the back bar.
This scene that so cheekily encapsulates the American consumer would not only cement the rise of coffee’s second wave (through re-energized cafe culture at places like Starbucks and Peet’s Coffee), but also that of the flavored caffe latte, which has since spawned such viral progeny as eggnog, peppermint mocha, and, of course, pumpkin spice.Īt once beloved and maligned, the distinctly American practice of doctoring espresso with flavored syrups and copious amounts of steamed milk purportedly dates back to San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood in the early 1980s.