It’s not hard to find unique coffee beverages, most every café comes up with hot and cold drinks matching coffee with various flavors. I’ve never been one to get flavored syrup in my drinks, and other than the capuorange, I usually give the special creations a pass in favor of old reliables.
I stopped by The Coffee Bar‘s Shaw location recently, and while waiting for my turn at the register took a gander at the menu board.
Hey, look, signature drinks.
A short time ago I mentioned that for some reason the people at Coca-Cola thought combining their iconic cola with “rich, luxurious” coffee was a good idea. I tried to forget about it, but recently I saw that Jenn Chen at Sprudge did a taste test and my curiosity got the better of me. I purposely didn’t read the article first, since I was already coming into this with negative preconceptions. Stopped by a local market, plunked down my money for a can of the stuff, opened it up and gave it a whirl.
Oof. No bueno. What seemed like a bad idea may be even worse in reality.
I won’t bore you with a long, detailed review. Basically, here’s the deal: if you like Coke, you will be disappointed. If you like coffee, you’ll really be disappointed.
Each sip starts with the underwhelming flavor of a poor quality off-brand cola that is nowhere near as good as Coke, and finishes with a flavorless sensation of weak, bland coffee. There is nothing rich or luxurious about it. They’ve combined two things many like and worsened them. They may be going for 1 + 1 = 3, but they flunked and ended up at 1 + 1 = -7.
Let me start with a little reminiscence. When I was a little kid, I would start most every day with a breakfast of Cheerios cereal in milk, along with a glass of orange juice. My still developing mind often thought, “Cheerios taste great. OJ tastes great. Cheerios and OJ would be awesome!” So once or twice I poured my juice into the cereal, and discovered that Cheerios and orange juice in the same bowl tastes awful.
My childhood stupidity came to mind recently when a friend shared a news story about, well, this:
