The Artís team took a diligent approach to the drink’s creation. They used a mortar and pestle to crush up spices and experimented until the found the flavor profile they wanted. They put the final product, with a mix of warming spices, a small amount of sugar and pumpkin puree, on the menu and waited to see how customers would react.

“It was our top selling drink for pretty much the entire run,” Margerison said. “Each year when it comes out, people are fanatical about it.”

To make the latte, barista Alexis Williams steams milk with a housemade pumpkin syrup. (Shelby Pope)

Now, the drink remains one of their their best sellers during the fall season that it’s available. (Their top selling drink? Another flavored coffee concoction, their vanilla latte made from a syrup the staff makes with vanilla beans.) During winter, they replace it with a peppermint mocha made with Ecuadorian chocolate and a mint simple syrup--“straight peppermint oil is like trying to drink fire,” Margerison said--they make themselves, which is equally as popular.

The pumpkin spice latte at Spruce Cafe. (Spruce Cafe )

It’s a similar situation at Spruce Cafe in South San Francisco. When the cafe opened in the fall of 2016, they soon found that their customers expected them to offer seasonal drinks. The cafe makes their pastries in house, so manager Cynthia Dai realized that the spices and flavorings they used in their pastries could easily be added to their drinks. They started creating a pumpkin spice latte, but it required some tinkering. At Starbucks, they use large amounts of of sugar and spice in their specialty drinks to be tasted over their dark roasted coffee’s strong flavor. But since Spruce uses a light roast espresso blend from San Francisco’s Ritual Coffee, they had to work to make the drink balanced, and not overwhelm the coffee. They settled on a simple syrup mixed with pumpkin puree and a pumpkin pie spice blend to be used in the drink and also created an eggnog latte and a peppermint mocha featuring crushed up peppermint candies in the drink. (The peppermint mocha is the store’s top seller.)

It makes sense for the shop to offer those kinds of drinks, said Dai. “If you don’t, the menu is really limited,” she pointed out. Plus, people crave different coffee drinks at different times. “I’m a serious coffee drinker when I go into coffee shops, I usually go for a macchiato or espresso or pour overs,” she said. “But sometimes I just want something really sweet. It all depends on the drinker...what their lifestyle is. We’re trying to accustom to their lifestyle more [so] than making the customer get used to our offerings.”

Margerison, a Massachusetts native who grew up drinking Dunkin’ Donuts’ sweetened, milky coffee, agrees. “When I moved to the Bay Area, it was interesting for me to see how much just snobbery there was,” he said of the local coffee scene. “People are on one side or the other. They’re either for [specialty drinks], or they’re these purists that can’t see any other way. They believe that coffee should be coffee and only coffee. We're kind of these weirdos in the middle.”

Artís Coffee's homeade pumpkin syrup makes a subtler, less sweet latte. (Shelby Pope)

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Local Coffee Shops Offer Seasonal Drinks, Without the Fake Stuff