A Barista’s Guide To (not boring) Coffee Drinks

Go on, add some cream and sugar.

There is a tried and true formula for the modern fancy coffee drink.

Flavored syrup + espresso + milk = something delicious

With the late-20th century rise of syrup companies like Torani and Monin alongside corporate giants like Starbucks, it’s no surprise that drinks deviating from the traditional Italian coffee lexicon pushed to the forefront of cafe menus. Common as it may be now, the vanilla latte was once an oddity on a menu board.

However, the tradition of adding things to coffee—whether it be spices, fruits, syrups, or fats—goes back far further. Traditional coffee drinks from all over the world feature brews sweetened and enhanced with everything from condensed milk to cinnamon. The Café Cubano, Cà Phê Sữa Đá, Turkish coffee, and Hong Kong’s Yuanyang only begin to scratch the surface of culturally significant coffee drinks. Food52 has a write-up on the history of flavored lattes that goes deeper into this history but my question right now is this: Where the heck are we going with all of this?

As cafes diversify their options to keep pace with the improved accessibility to making excellent coffee at home, the trend towards unique and more exploratory coffee drinks continues at full-throttle. Locales such as Discourse and Dayglow showcase signature drink menus that present more like something you’d find in a high-end cocktail lounge than a coffee shop. Social media videos boast multi-colored layered drinks set in the foreground of aesthetically pleasing granite counters. Barista competitions showcase grandiose, sensory-stunning drinks that are blasted with more dry ice fog than you could ever want (I’m calling out myself here, sincerest apologies to the judges on my 2024 USBC panel.)

Yet, venturing into making these types of drinks yourself can feel insurmountable. After all, a flavored syrup + espresso + milk = something delicious, right?

Let me encourage you to think beyond that framework.

As a recipe developer of this particular breed of fancy coffee drink—a signature beverage, if you will—these are my starting points for developing outside of the tried and true formula.

This is the current state of my creative process and I encourage you to use it as a reference point—not as law—for your own drinks.

The Signature Beverage's "Mood"

The first thing I think about when creating a signature beverage is what sort of tone I want to set with the drink. What I want the person enjoying it to feel.

Is this a drink that's going to refresh someone? Make them feel sophisticated? Is it comforting? Familiar? Out of their comfort zone and adventurous?

One of my favorite pieces of packaging design lives on the back of Smith Tea’s Lord Bergamot sachets. Underneath the fold of the wrapper is the sentence, "Best enjoyed in the heat of a summer day."

This is the essence of what I'm trying to figure out at this stage of development. I want the story and tone that's going to trickle down into every following decision.

The Primary Flavor Profile

More often than not, I think about flavor in terms of color. The second decision I tackle in recipe development is what my primary flavor component is going to be, or—more accurately to my own process—the color profile of the drink. Below are a few examples to get your brain spinning.

• Tropical (orange, yellow, light pink): Pineapple, mango, papaya, citrus fruits.

• Floral (pink, red, purple, light blue): Tea flavors, lavender, chamomile, rose, orange blossom.

• Herbaceous (green, umber, tan, pale purple): Rosemary, thyme, mint, celery, sage.

• Confectionary (deep brown, silver, cream, beige): Chocolate, vanilla, caramel, sugar, coffee.

There are an endless directions you could go when selecting a primary flavor profile but I do think the ones listed above are the easiest to approach when you’re starting out, both from an ideation and consumption standpoint.

It's at this point that you're able to start really making concrete decisions about the ingredients that are going to be in your drink. I find it beneficial to initially select two or three base ingredients that you're going to begin experimenting with (along with the knowledge that you can try out others later).

For example, when I was developing my signature beverage for the 2024 US Barista Championship, I wanted to create a tropical drink with a juice base. I knew I had to limit my initial range of testing ingredients in order to streamline the development stage. I chose to work around the flavors of orange and mango. Starting within these constraints helped ensure I didn't lose myself in testing every single tropical fruit juice I could get my hands on.

The Coffee Base Type

Alright, let's get into the meat of our drink. And by meat, I mean coffee.

I find this decision easiest to make after I've decided on the overall drink's flavor profile, not before. Essentially, there are two layers to this decision: what coffee are you going to use and what brewing method are you going to use.

Let's look at some different brewing methods first.

• Espresso: Strong, intense flavor and body. Can often be used as a 1:1 spirit replacement in cocktail templates.

• Cold brew & concentrate: Low acidity, very "coffee" forward flavor. Great as a base for iced signature beverages. Cold brew concentrate can also be an accessible substitute for chilled espresso.

• Instant coffee: Predictable, easily adjusted, and great when you need to infuse coffee flavor without added liquid.

• Liquid concentrates: In the last five years, there's been an influx in liquid coffee concentrates on the market and if you're willing to wade through the ones that are less than stellar, you can find predictably useful options similar to instant coffee.

• Filter coffee: The flavor profile and body are highly dependent on what coffee is used. I traditionally build filter coffee drinks around the coffee’s flavor and not the other way around.

The second component to choosing your coffee is what sort of coffee are you actually using. Perhaps a naturally processed Colombian Pink Bourbon? A washed Kenyan? A lychee co-ferment? Honey-processed Wush Wush? What's the roast profile? The possibilities are endless. There are no rules to what coffee will go best in any one drink but I just caution you to be intentional and thoughtful about your selection.

A delicate, floral drink can easily be washed out by a dark roast when a lighter, more fruit-forward coffee would have shined.

The Auxiliary Flavors

To avoid your drink being entirely one note, it's important to include secondary and complimentary flavors. Often, these will be flavors that live on the "opposite" side of your drink's primary profile. The goal is to create complexity in each sip and for the final drink to be greater than the sum of its parts.

I'll caution you to not go too overboard on your auxiliary flavors. Adding ingredients solely for the sake of saying they're in the drink does more harm than good if they don't actively contribute to the drinking experience.

Let's return to my 2024 USBC signature beverage as a continued example. Very early, I settled on using a 50/50 blend of orange and mango juice as my primary ingredient. Both of these juices have a heavy body, very orange flavor profile, and are tropical. If I were to just continue down this vein and continue adding ingredients like passionfruit and papaya, I'd not only wash out my initial flavors but the drink's balance would be thrown into total disarray.

A better strategy is to experiment with ingredients that add a balance to the drink.

• Acidity: Bright, cutting flavors—most readily found in citrus

• Sweetness: Syrups, cordials, fruit juice

• Salinity: Salt or salty ingredients as a flavor enhancer

• Aroma: Aromatic ingredients/garnishes to transform the perceived flavor

• Spice: Rounding out brighter drinks with warming and baking spices

• Heat: Adding actual spice (chili, pepper, etc)

You may have noticed that throughout all of this, we haven't talked about texture yet...

Buckle up, folks.

The Tactile & Texture

Boy, oh boy, this is my favorite part. I'm a self-described texture person.

Think of me as one of those people who would probably eat packing peanuts if they could (wait, can I?)

My obsession with drink texture admittedly comes from my time in barista competitions. During these, a large percentage of your signature beverage's score results from identifying its tactile traits. This means it's beneficial to create drinks that are easily identifiable. When talking about the tactile of the drink, there are three main things I'm including.

Weight/body: Where does the drink fall on the scale of tea to heavy cream?

Texture: What does the drink feel like in my mouth?

Finish: What is the lingering effect after each sip?

I, like most people, have certain techniques and tactile preferences when it comes to drinks and I'll list some below with the caveat that this list is constantly expanding and evolving.

• Sparkling/bubbly: Carbonation, force carbonation, fermentation

• Fluffy: Nitrogen infusion, foams, egg whites

• Smooth: Dairy additions/bases, straining

• Syrupy: Gomme syrups, cordials

• Silky: Clarification

• Slushy/Crystalline: Blending with ice and emulsifiers

There are definitely drinks that don't require an explicit texture element and where the ingredients alone combine to make something impactful. However, I will always think about texture during recipe development even if it doesn't lead to action.

The Presentation & Garnish

This is the part where I really like to play. As a die-hard theater kid (surprise, surprise), I love a little bit of drama in my signature beverages. Or a lot. But who's keeping track?

A little anecdote before we dive into this section. During my training for the 2022 US Barista Championship, there was one moment that changed my view on drink presentation indefinitely. It happened two weeks before Nationals when I was doing a full routine run-through to one of my coaches, Andrea Allen (2020 USBC & 2021 World Barista Runner Up).

I had developed a limoncello-inspired espresso drink that was served in stemmed champagne flutes and—unbeknownst to me—I had spent so much time working on the drink that I'd become blind to it. An experience comparable to when you say a word too often and it no longer sounds like anything remotely intelligible.

Immediately after I finished the run-through, I awaited Andrea's notes, positive that everything was perfect and there was no possible way to improve my drink courses. After a moment of thought, she said, "Do you think there's a way we can change the signature beverage presentation a bit? Right now it's a brown liquid in a glass."

Ah. Yes. My first confrontation with the Brown Liquid Problem. She was absolutely right. For all the interesting flavors and textures I'd created within the signature beverage, it lacked any visual interest.

The Brown Liquid Problem: What arises when you add coffee, of any type, to a drink and are immediately greeted with a brown liquid.

Don't despair in the face of the BLP! This is where thoughtful garnishing and presentation comes into play. In a perfect world, a garnish should serve more than one function.

• Visually represent or call back to the flavors within the drink

  • An orange coffee soda garnished with citrus wheels

• Enhance the consumer's visual experience

  • The placement of edible flowers on a coffee sour

• Affect the taste experience through aroma

  • Smoking a sprig of rosemary in a latte directly before serving it

• Affect the taste experience through the glassware choice

  • Serving a drink in a glencairn glass to better funnel aromatics to the consumer's nose

• Provide a small bite that pairs with the drink

  • Garnishing with speared berries or fruits that can be consumed alongside the beverage

I'll be the first to admit and apologize for the fact that I'll occasionally add a non-functional garnish to a drink. It happens. While I won't begrudge you for it, I would encourage you to try to push beyond purely visual garnishes more often than not.

Other Miscellaneous Components

Finally, here are an assortment of development considerations that I don’t think fit into any one category.

• If you're serving your drink layered (such as floating an espresso atop a latte), how do you want the consumer to interact with it?

  • If it should be stirred, have you provided a straw or stirring device?

• Are you going to incorporate color?

  • Possibly using a bright syrup or milk using natural food coloring (beet root, spirulina, butterfly pea powder, ube).

• What's the volume of the drink?

  • Complex and coffee forward drinks often benefit from being served in smaller amounts while lattes have much more flexibility in their size range.

• Can your drink be served hot and cold? Or just one way?

  • With coffee drinks, lattes in particular, the expectation is often that they can be versatile in temperature. Be clear on how its best enjoyed.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, coffee signature beverages should be fun. Heck, coffee should be fun. That's the goal of all of this. Make whatever concoction delights you and then make it again. Or try something else.

If you’re looking for inspiration or want to try some of my public recipes, you can find those here.

Talk soon,

Morgan