So Starbucks’ quest to get away from the “basic” label continues. The beloved provider of every betches’ lifeblood (the PSL, duh) just announced the addition of a bunch of new stuff, and TBH it’s all hilariously hipster. The most obvious culprit is the Sous Vide Egg Bites, which are gluten-free and make Starbucks sound like they’re going for a Michelin star, but trust me when I say the newest drink, the cascara latte, is pretty fucking hipster too.
Let’s start with WTF cascara means. The important part of coffee is the bean (fucking duh), but first, you have to get through the fruit surrounding it—the cascara is just the outer shell. Usually, the coffee cherry is thrown away, but apparently, sometimes people dry the cascara and make some weird coffee/tea infusion out of it. Please allow me to point out that infusions are automatically +50 points on the scale of food hipsterdom.
Last week, Starbucks announced that the first new latte flavor of the year is based on this cascara infusion thing. The syrup is made of coffee cherry extract, coconut flavoring, and a fuckton of sugar, of course. Because that wasn’t hipster enough, words like “subtle” and “lightly sweet” were also tossed around with wild abandon. I remind you, this is fucking coffee, not a $500 bottle of wine.
Oh yeah, and the latte is sprinkled with a topping meant to look like a coffee bean, which is utterly pointless because it’s covered up with a lid. Will someone please tell Starbucks to stop trying so fucking hard?
The drink became available to Starbucks rewards members (so every betch ever) on January 6. Everyone else has to wait until January 10 to find out what hipster tastes like in coffee form.
