This is the beginning of an actual conversation I had with a female friend last week.
“Are you excited” she asked.
“About what?”
“You haven’t heard the news?”
“I guess not.”
“I thought you reporters paid attention to the news.”
“So give me a hint.”
“Pumpkin spice lattes are returning to Starbucks next week.”
Ugh.
I had heard the news. But I promptly stored it in the “News I’ve heard but couldn’t care less about” file. Much like stories about what Hollywood celebrities – outside of Sandra Bullock – do, I don’t much care about some new fancy drink introduced by Starbucks.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Starbucks coffee. But I have some very specific rules about what I drink: I like coffee that tastes like coffee. Beer that tastes like beer. Bourbon that tastes like bourbon. And, now I guess I must add, Coca-Cola that tastes like Coca-Cola.
I don’t know exactly when it began that people decided to start adding different flavors to drinks that already have distinctive taste. When I was little, my mother would let me drink coffee. But the “coffee” I drank was a glass of milk and sugar with a splash of coffee.
For a long time, I added sugar to my coffee. But in the last decade or so, I drink it black because I like the taste of a good cup of coffee. I seem to be in the minority.
I went to a fast-food restaurant’s drive-through a few years ago to get a cup of coffee.
“I’d like a large, black coffee, please,” I said.
“Yes, sir,” was the response. “Would you like cream and sugar?”
But it’s not just flavored coffee. I remember being at a bar on one of our football trips years ago when someone ordered a certain kind of beer – I don’t remember the name – and the beer arrived with a big slice of orange in it.
I remember thinking, “If you have to have a piece of fruit in your beer to make it taste good, you’ve probably chosen a bad beer.” But now, putting fruit in beer is a thing. So much so, that there’s a variety of Bud Lite that comes with the lime flavor already in the bottle.
And now distillers are getting to the act. I go to the liquor store to buy a bottle of bourbon and I can’t find regular bourbon for the apple bourbon, honey bourbon, peach bourbon, maple bourbon, cherry bourbon, vanilla bourbon and cinnamon bourbon.
And speaking of cinnamon, Coca-Cola is coming out with a Cinnamon Coke this fall, to go along with Cherry Coke, Vanilla Coke, Lime Coke, Cherry Vanilla Coke, Orange Vanilla Coke. You get the point.
They are also coming out with a cranberry-flavored Sprite. A friend said, “If they’re going to add cranberry to Sprite, they might as well add the vodka and then I’d consider buying it.”
Look, I know a lot of you are scoffing at this. You like your grande, iced, sugar-free, vanilla latte with soy milks or whatever.
But I’m a simple man with simple tastes. You can keep all your flavors. That’s how I like it.
