Tuesday, October 25, 2022

Seasonal Sippin' with Chobani? - I thought they only made yogurt?


Chobani Coffee - Cold Brew with Pumpkin Spice Creamer

How often do you need to drink coffee to be considered a "coffee drinker?" 

In college I definitely qualified. I worked at Panera bread, and between school, work, running a college club, my Etsy shop, and starting this blog...I never slept. My secret weapon? A 32-oz soda cup filled with ice, several shots of espresso (every shot is actually 2), 3 pumps of caramel, and 1% milk. Sometimes topped with whipped cream. Hate to say this, but sometimes I would drink two of those in a day. I don't know how I survived (or how I avoided lactose intolerance) but after a year my schedule lightened up and I stopped cold-turkey. I was younger then, stopping was super easy. No headaches, no withdrawals, no side effects. 

Since college I would say I drink coffee roughly 20 times a year. (Even that is being generous.) Have I lost my caffeine consumption cred? Do I no longer qualify as a "coffee drinker?" 


When I do drink coffee, you can immediately tell the difference. Normal coffee? I have a little bounce to my step and hate everything slightly less than normal. But a client of mine gifted me a few "turbo" coffee drinks with vanilla oat milk and I felt like I was vibrating! I started bouncing and dancing while I worked and felt like I was full of bees. It was awesome, but I can't imagine chasing that feeling every day.   

That said, a big part of Fall and Halloween culture in America just so happens to be coffee focused. What is fall without a pumpkin spiced latte? And I bought a decent amount of these products, and there are only a few days left until Halloween, so watch out world, I'm about to be caffeinated! 


For the record, I picked this up thinking it was coffee creamer that I could pair with the Pumpkin Chai Death Wish coffee I also bought this year. (Review for that later this week.) Turns out, it's cold brew coffee with pumpkin spice creamer. Looking at it now, "cold brew" was a dead giveaway, but who phrases it like that? Isn't this just flavored, iced, cold brew coffee? I think it was an easy mistake. 

After I opened it, I had to double check the packaging again. It's so pale! 

When I tell people that I rarely drink coffee, they think that, when I do, I must be drinking it with tons of cream and sugar. Not so. I may not drink it as "black as my soul," like the people out there that make black coffee their entire personality. (Says the girl who makes junk food and Pomeranians her entire personality.) I drink it was one cream and maybe 1-2 sugars. I don't like it super milky, or super sweet. This? I guess they went ham with the farm fresh milk. 


I poured myself a glass, using my clear "vintage" 2012 Target Poison Halloween tumbler, just to show you how pale it is. Poured, it actually looks like an iced chai latte. (One of my favorite drinks.) 

I took a sip. It's very creamy. I would say this is like an 85% milk to a 15% coffee/PSL flavoring ratio. More milk-focused that I would have liked, but the seasonal spice blend is still prominent and recognizable, and thanks to the cold brew process, the coffee flavoring is very smooth. Thankfully, it's also very lightly sweetened. Too often these premade coffee drinks turn out to be overly sweet, like a milkshake. With this, you can adjust the sweetness to your liking, and for me, it's perfect right out of the bottle. 

As far as premade bottled coffee goes, this too milk-heavy, even for a casual coffee consumer like me, but for what it is, I like it. 


I had my black-coffee-is-their-entire-personality-friend over and after giving it a try, they opted to use it as creamer for the aforementioned Death Wish coffee, and really enjoyed it. Coffee-infused-flavored-coffee-creamer-Could be a new way to market this in the future! 

Seasonal coffee creamers are so insanely sweet these days, like melted ice cream. This might be too milky to be a decent iced coffee, but as a coffee creamer, it blows the overly sweet stuff out of the water. I would buy this again, but I wouldn't use it for it's intended purpose. 

How often do you drink coffee? And what's your favorite coffee creamer? 

What better subject for today's ramble than the Pumpkin Spice Latte. Is this seasonal juggernaut falling out of fashion? 

Once so meme-able that no white-girl parody was complete without a Starbuck's cup in-hand, it seems to be losing momentum. In previous years every shop had their own take on the drink, both hot and iced, and it even took over snack foods. We got things like pumpkin spice latte flavored m&m's, peeps, and candy corn. But, the pumpkin spice flow seems to have slowed. Is the drink in danger of disappearing? 

I don't think so. I think the real problem is that our commercial consumption calendar is all screwed up. For years things slowly crept forward, encroaching on the holiday/season before it, but in the last two years we had a major jump. Shops started releasing their pumpkin spiced drinks and products in AUGUST. If we're celebrating pumpkin spice lattes in summer, what is there to look forward to in actual fall? We had a bunch of TikToks and Reels showing people in the summer heat throwing pumpkins around and clasping their lattes, but now, in the middle of pumpkin-season...no one cares anymore. It's on to the next thing. 

It bums me out. Like, when my sister and I were kids, and knew Santa wasn't real anymore (spoiler alert), our mom gave us the option of opening our gifts before Christmas or choosing the wait. I waited, my sister didn't. Come actual Christmas, my sister felt kind of sad she didn't have anything to open because she opted to do it early. That is how I feel about Pumpkin Spice Lattes and seasonal items overall. We lose some of the magic this way, and I hope this time next year, we can get a little bit of it back. 

Fans of this would also like: Pumpkin Spice Latte m&m's, The Halloween Tree, Bolthouse Farms Pumpkin Spice Latte, Pumpkin Spice Marshmallows

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