Launching a Fall Menu

Good Morning! Happy Thursday! It’s actually like 2pm but i wanted to hop on here quick and talk about fall stuff while it’s fresh on my mind and before I fall behind! (haha) I’m drinking water to combat all the coffee from earlier today, and listening to the album “The Flower Lane” by Ducktails here at the cafe. It’s pretty chill acoustic indie pop. Since my last music post i’ve got a handful of new albums I want to talk about, but one per blog will have to do.

So We Launched Our Fall Menu

To quickly list those drinks we have a pumpkin spice latte, a brown sugar maple pecan cold brew, a vanilla apple “cider seltzer” (with or without espresso), and a vanilla apple black iced tea. I’ve got a bunch of theory behind why those drinks and how I break down the menu process, so let’s get in to it.

I started with “what flavors represent fall” to me. Personally I think of fall colors first, reds and oranges. So that’s apples, pumpkins, maple leaves, etc. Especially living up north as a little kid, I think of raw apple cider really fondly and visiting pumpkin patches. I learned about how good and versatile real maple syrup is from my dad and from a couple at a farmers market I met who live in Vermont and bring stuff to FL every year; We bought a ton from them and froze it, used it forever.

So let’s use pumpkins apples and maple; They’re colorful, memorable, fall themed, and mean a lot to me. Next I need to think about how I can turn them in to a syrup sauce or other base to use with drinks. If we make a really fantastic base, it’s versatile and can be prepared in advance for drinks that are easy to execute at volume. I’m also thinking about how to avoid things like our house whipped cream, or I don’t know a latte with an extra shot, a pour over, stuff that takes time to prep!

Pumpkin was pretty straightforward, I tasted a few organic purees then started messing with it as an iteration of a pumpkin spice latte. I thought about doing a pumpkin caramel, or a pumpkin hopscotch (hopscotch being our most popular regular special with vanilla and caramel.) When I actually began tasting I learned that pumpkin is super strong! So like a banana in a smoothie, it can carry or overpower a drink from texture to flavor.

I then thought about how i’d source spices, and was considering a spice grinder or food processor. A food processor would have the added benefit of crushing apples for our apple drink. A spice grinder would also be great for our chai, since we source a tea and spice blend from our tea maker Hugo now (kind of a long story but we use what they use for their boxed chai concentrate, but raw, which gives us some prep room). What I quickly realized was this would mean a space and money investment that I wasn’t totally prepared for. we’d be carrying tons of spices, cutting apples, adding new shelves or stuffing ours, etc. I was broke and short on time, as you often are as a new business. I’ve also become a lot more hesitant for major changes on a whim, guarding what i’ve built and understanding the risks and rewards of spending on a limited budget.

So I found a raw spice blend I liked that had everything I might want in a pumpkin pie, and measured it in to taste. Instead of fighting the pumpkin I just added enough simple syrup (1:1 sugar to water) to thin the puree out and let it carry the drink! Our pumpkin spice is a lot less sweet, but it tastes way more like actual pumpkin pie in a latte than any other drink I’ve ever had. I love that. I love our PSL : ] “The Great Pumpkin” is a cute simple Charlie Brown reference and an awesome name for this drink.

Maple Syrup has an inherent “manliness” factor that cold brew shares. I wrote a rejected article for barista magazine a few years ago about this phenomenon, when nitro cold brew was really connecting with older men off the “it looks like draft beer and it’s super strong” thing. (they sent me a shirt and said thanks, can’t complain). Since then, cold brew has become as acceptable as black coffee in the manly man culture, at least in Florida. I decided to lean in to this with “the lumberjack.”

It’s basically just an iced coffee cream and sugar, but it rides the line of being a “regula’ cold brew” too. “Brown sugar maple pecan cold brew” makes no mention of cream, the focus is maple syrup and cold brew. Not too weird. Guys who normally just get the black cold brew have been willing to try it, and really like it. Even though it’s shoulder to shoulder with the foofoo pumpkin spiced latte. It has singlehandedly doubled my cold brew prep.

Apple cider is my personal favorite fall drink. I get stoked for it every year at the grocery store, I drink it in taller glasses than even my big guilty pleasure diner glass of cheap orange juice on a day off haha. I knew I wanted to do a sparkling apple cider, but my first instinct was to combine pre-made apple cider with our seltzer; This ratio didn’t really work, and when I started testing I couldn’t even find apple cider. A combination of expense and scarcity made this feel like a silly choice. So like with the pumpkin I thought about a food processor or knife and cutting board on bar, but I imagined the prep and storage on that to be excessive.

So I started testing apple purees and apple sauces, which shined right through our seltzer even with 1 or 2 scoops. At the end of the day these tasted like apple water, so the completed base also had some of our spice blend used for the pumpkin, and our house vanilla. I was testing this base on bar when someone ordered a lemon black iced tea, I didn’t have lemon so I offered to make her an apple vanilla tea; She liked the drink, and I liked it about as much as our sparkling apple cider, so we added both to the menu.

As an aside, the “Bone Apple Tea” was a placeholder name, but everyone I showed laughed so it stuck.

Reception So Far

SO far it’s been great, weekends have been packed with people coming down to try the fall menu. Everyone super likes the not so sweet pumpkin. I didn’t really know that people traveled for cafe specials, but I’ve seen more than a couple pumpkin spice maps haha. I did a photo shoot on Instagram for each of the drinks and it got a ton of traction. I did some comparisons and we got more hits than a lot of other more established cafes; I’m not sure if it was our timing or if we just did a stand out job with the photos, but it could be related to how infrequently we post compared to some others, it being our first seasonal menu, etc.

I expected the order of popularity to be Cider Soda > Great Pumpkin > LumberJack > Bone Apple Tea > Cider Soda with Spro

It’s more like Lumberjack > Great Pumpkin > Bone Apple Tea > Cider Soda with Spro > Cider Soda

iT’S ALL GOOD!

Something I didn’t say straight out but want to emphasize at the end here, is specialty drinks are an opportunity source and compose ingredients as great drinks. I don’t really like buying syrups or mixing them, because they’re just sugar with added oils for smell or flavor. A great example is our staple sunrise soda. It’s FL key-lime juice, house seltzer shaken until super carbonated, and espresso; it’s a key-lime juice and espresso highlight. People love it, I love it.

So if it’s fall and you’ve decided to do a smores latte for example, think about how you can go beyond the marshmallow and chocolate syrups. You can dip graham crackers in melted chocolate, you can toast a marshmallow with a hand torch. I know these things take more time and training, but you’re doing a handful over the course of an entire year, put in some effort for your people on both sides of the bar. You don’t have to make up ten drinks, you can do one or two really well. If it gets people talking it’s worth it.

I believe in you, if you’re reading this you’ve had food that I haven’t, you’ve had drinks I haven’t. Think about your experiences and what you like, think about how you can put those in front of someone who’s going to appreciate them. Create! Add fun things to your menu! People will try them and try to appreciate them like they appreciate you or your cafe! - Elias