Our Pumpkin Spice Syrup Starts With an Actual Pumpkin

You Know That Candle Taste

You have probably had one before. Somewhere around late September, half the coffee world turns orange, you order a pumpkin spice latte at an airport or a big chain, and what arrives is sweet, vaguely spiced, and tastes strangely like a scented candle. No pumpkin was involved at any point. Most versions of this drink come from a pump bottle of flavouring that has never met a vegetable.

This autumn we are doing one at Yugen, and we decided that if we were going to do it at all, we would do it properly. So Ionut cooked a pumpkin.

The Honest Bit First

Let us be clear about what this drink is. It is not a cupping-table coffee. Nobody is going to score it for acidity and florality. It is a seasonal indulgence, a dessert with an espresso spine, and we think that is completely fine. Specialty coffee sometimes behaves as if enjoying something sweet were a moral failing. We disagree. Fun and made properly are allowed to coexist; we just believe the sweet thing should be real.

It Starts With an Actual Pumpkin

Our syrup is made in-house, by Ionut, and it starts from real pumpkin purée, not a flavouring. We followed the from-scratch approach that James Hoffmann and the specialty coffee press rate as the top-tier way to make one. To be clear, neither he nor any magazine has anything to do with our little shop; we simply did our homework before turning on the stove.

Why does the purée matter? Pumpkin on its own is a gentle thing: earthy, faintly sweet, more texture than shout. In the syrup it does the job a flavouring cannot fake. It gives the drink real body and a rounded, natural sweetness for the spices to sit on. Take the pumpkin away and all you have left is spiced sugar water.

Five Warm Spices, and We Are Only Naming Two

Into the syrup go five warm spices, the classic specialty blend. Cinnamon and allspice are two of them. The other three stay behind the counter, because a seasonal drink deserves a little mystery.

Here is why real spices beat a synthetic blend. Whole spices carry dozens of volatile aromatic compounds: cinnamon's warmth comes largely from a molecule called cinnamaldehyde, and allspice leans on eugenol, the same compound that makes clove smell like clove. A manufactured pumpkin spice flavouring typically reduces all of that to one or two loud notes. Your brain notices the difference, because most of what you call taste is actually retronasal smell, aroma travelling from the back of your mouth up to your nose as you drink. It can easily tell a full chord from a single note played loudly.

What the Coffee Is Doing Under All That

At heart this is a latte: espresso, milk, and our syrup, served hot or iced. Steamed milk brings its own soft sweetness from lactose, and the syrup brings the pumpkin and the spice, so the espresso underneath has to hold its ground. That is why a medium roast belongs under milk drinks like this one, with deeper, chocolatey notes that cut through. Our light roasts stay where they shine, in the V60, the Chemex and the AeroPress, where nothing is competing with them.

Finding It at Yugen

The Pumpkin Spice Latte is on our menu now, €5, hot or iced. And since autumn in Costa Adeje still mostly means sunshine, the iced version makes more sense here than it would almost anywhere else in Europe. Come try it, tell us if you can taste the difference a real pumpkin makes, and feel free to try guessing the three secret spices. Alex, Madalina and Ionut will neither confirm nor deny.

Thanks for reading, and see you at the counter. Whatever you order, we hope it tastes like someone actually made it.

Real pumpkin, real spices, real espresso: a silly drink, made seriously.

Sources

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