Best Food Writing 2015 Read Online Free PDF Page B

book club style. “I’ve tasted a lot of pumpkin spice beverages,” says Dukes. “You just keep narrowing down and narrowing down.”
    The pumpkin spice cabal decided the flavoring should be a sauce, not the typical flavored syrup. That extra viscosity helped mimic the proper heft of a mouthful of pie. Ultimately the version with high levels of both pumpkin and spice won consensus.
    The next question: what to call the thing. “Initially we were being asked to come up with a name that matches the season,” Dukes recalls. His team batted around the idea of “fall harvest latte,” a name that at best didn’t quite explain the drink and at worst connoted sipping on a hay bale. They settled on pumpkin spice latte, a simple name that communicated all the happy-fuzzy feelings associated with pumpkin but reflected the spices’ prominence.
    Early tests at 100 stores in Vancouver and Washington, DC, in the fall of 2003 portended customers might actually like this wild card of a drink. “You just looked at the sales results and you knew,” Dukes remembers. “It clearly separated itself from any other beverages we had tested at that point in the market.”
    The company’s 10-year PSL anniversary hoopla happened last year, oddly enough, but the pumpkin spice latte made its nationwide debut one decade ago this September. The following month, October 2004, company sales spiked 11 percent compared with the previous year, thanks in large part to the new hit drink. But once technology—particularly the nascent quivers of social media—caught up, it would become something even bigger.
    â€œEvery year I’ll drink at least one to commemorate that it’s fall,” Melody Overton said of the pumpkin spice latte on a recent evening at the Starbucks on Olive Way. You might say that Overton’s a fan of Starbucks. An attorney in Pioneer Square by day, she keeps a personal blog and self-published a book, both dedicated to the coffee company’s general doings and her various Starbucks-related adventures—likeroad tripping to Sacramento to sample test drinks at locations there. She refers to her encounters with Howard (Schultz, the CEO) and Cliff (Burrows, the head of Starbucks in both North and South America) with mononymous awe and even sends Howard a birthday email every year. She’d like to convey those same wishes to Cliff, she just doesn’t know his birthday.
    Despite her annual pumpkin spice assignation, though, and despite having a poster of the drink hanging in her office, “I’m not actually a huge pumpkin spice latte fan,” Overton confesses. “It’s a little bit sweet for me.”
    Laila Ghambari knows what she means. The director of coffee at the local chainlets of Cherry Street coffeehouses (her dad’s the founder) and winner of the 2014 United States Barista Championship, Ghambari is not ashamed to admit that she enjoys the occasional hit of pumpkin spice.
    The flavor has now infiltrated coffee shops everywhere. In 2012 Cherry Street started making its own sauce, one that ratchets down the sweetness, amps up the spice, and—unlike the original—contains actual pureed pumpkin. (During a three-month window last year, Cherry Street baristas went through 24 gallons of the house pumpkin spice syrup and served up roughly 3,500 of the seasonal lattes.)
    America’s affection for specialty drinks stems from its collective history of drinking really bad coffee, Ghambari says. The sort that involves a screw-topped tub of granules and a little plastic scoop. “It doesn’t taste good, so you put cream and sugar in it. Now, even if the coffee doesn’t taste bad, people assume it’s going to taste that way. They automatically order something with syrup in it”—the coffee equivalent of salting food before taking a bite.
    I finally drank one myself on a chilled afternoon last fall at the Starbucks