When the dust settles and the sun sets on this, the summer of the year of our Lord 2015, what will we remember? What objects will we bury in our time capsules? What lyrics will go in our novelty Summer 2015 versions of "We Didn't Start The Fire?" Will they include the words "Starbucks" and "Frappuccino" and "Blended Beverage?" They will for me.
This summer is the fateful summer that Starbucks introduced six so-called
“#FanFlavors” – flavors created by opening a middle
schooler's Trapper Keeper and making a rebus out of the stickers:
Caramel Cocoa Cluster, Cinnamon Roll, Cupcake, Cotton Candy, Red
Velvet and Lemon Bar. With the #FanFlavors also came the Mini Frappuccino, a teeny-tiny ten-ounce Frappuccino for boring
people and children to Instagram with the hashtag #socute.
This summer is the fateful summer that I made it my personal mission to try it all.
I
would kill two birds with one coffee bean. Six flavors, ten ounces
each, consumed sequentially – no skipping ahead until I finished
the whole ten ounces. Middle schooler's play, I thought. So, armed
with Lactaid and clad in vintage Versace jeans and a baby tee
which ominously read “i never loved u anyway [sic],” I drove to the 'Bucks to consume more than my daily recommended calorie intake in the form of six mini Starbucks® Frappuccino® blended
beverages.
Thankfully,
the barista recognized me, so when I told her, “I know you're going
to hate me, but I want six mini Frappuccinos,” she played along. “I
hate you so much!” she laughed, but for a split-second, I believed
her.
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| They're all shouting my name |
Ten
minutes and several awkward stares later, an army of tiny
Frappuccinos confronted me. I was helpless in their presence. I
panicked, and started inventing aliases and corresponding
personalities – anything to explain what I was doing at Starbucks
at 11 am on a Wednesday drinking six Frappuccino® blended beverages
alone. Somewhere between “Amanda,” a teenage girl
who lost a bet and “Maria,” whose best friend's dying wish was to
drink every flavor of Frappuccino, I made the conscious decision to
start off with the Caramel Cocoa Cluster.
I
chose the CCC mostly because it was one of only two flavors to
actually contain coffee and, therefore, caffeine, and my aliases were
becoming uninspired at best. It was also the flavor that tasted most
like a Frappuccino – equal parts generic sweetness, coffee,
milkshake and dessert. It is the perfect drink for channeling Veruca Salt, for when all you want
is coffee and ice cream and a chocolate bar, i.e., how I feel every afternoon around 3. Buoyed by the
experience (or possibly the sugar or the coffee or the Lactaid or
some combination of all four), I barrelled mouthfirst into a Cupcake
Frappuccino.
It
was a mistake. Vanilla and hazelnut syrup put the “cupcake” in
Cupcake Frappuccino. BUT: Vanilla tastes like nothing. Hazelnut often
tastes like nothing. And as we all know from basic math and rewriting
the lyrics to '70s pop classics, nothing plus nothing means
nothing. You gotta have something to make a Cupcake Frappuccino.
Disgusted by this blatant
failure at basic Frappuccino math, I broke my own self-imposed rule
and moved on to the company of the Red Velvet Frappuccino.
The
Frappuccino website describes Red Velvet as “[a]
confectionery-inspired blend of chocolaty [sic] chips, mocha sauce,
raspberry and vanilla syrup, topped with vanilla whipped cream.
Perfectly sweet and velvety smooth.” I describe it as “Retching
Noise [Extended Remix ft. Gagging and Choking].” The flavor itself
is quite possibly the most accurate representation of the act of
throwing up that I have ever experienced. I tasted seven different
kinds of partially-digested food, first one by one, and then
together, topped off strong notes of stomach bile. I even felt the
burn of stray puke in my nostrils while drinking it, despite only
fantasizing about throwing up. Instinctively, I grabbed something to
cleanse my palate – a Cotton Candy frap. I thought the Cotton Candy
frap would taste like pink, and it did, if pink tastes like raspberry. I gulped it down as fast as I could so I could move on to
the next flavor with my taste buds intact. But they weren't. I wanted it all to be
over. Feeling a double-edged sugar/caffeine crash coming on, I
located the Cinnamon Roll frap, the other flavor to contain coffee and took a sip. It tasted sort of like a cinnamon roll, but mostly like butter. It
was kind of gross.
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| The home (st)retch |
The
last frap, the Lemon Bar, was smooth and cool and refreshing. It was
also mostly melted, which gave it a weird milky consistency. The ditty “Milk, Milk Lemonade” ran through my head and made me gag. What
even am I doing? I thought. I
looked up. The crowd had changed. Instead of suburbanites who
personified the phrase “on-the-go,” the space was now filled with
elderly men and women playing board games and someone who looked
exactly like Joaquin Phoenix in Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of
Inherent Vice. These
were my people. I was at peace. I sipped the rest of the Cupcake
frap, which now tasted uncannily like the four Lactaid pills I had
taken an hour before, tossed the rest of the cups, and walked out of
the 'Bucks, feeling both triumphant and defeated. My t-shirt said it all: i never loved u anyway.
