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What is it about Pumpkin Spice?
What is it about Pumpkin Spice? A look into the season’s most fashionable beverage, and just what it is that makes it so weirdly irresistible.
What is it?
The component parts of a large orange vegetable combined with refined cane sugar syrup and various toasted ground spices. Though that doesn’t sound particularly Pinterest-friendly does it?
Pumpkin Pie, an American dessert dating back over 100 years, is likely where this now widely loved flavour was born from. Pumpkin Pie typically contains a blend of warming spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and cloves. Around 2004, before the days of reusable coffee cups, Starbucks introduced the Pumpkin Spice Latte. Due to its uniqueness at the time, and how charmingly seasonal the drink was, it absolutely exploded in popularity.
Interestingly, in its first years of existence, the PSL didn’t actually contain any real pumpkin. Only in recent years has pumpkin puree (or pumpkin juice in my home country of the UK, much to the delight of Harry Potter lovers) found its way into this iconic Autumn drink. The addition of an actual vegetable into our coffee didn’t put us off however, as every year the PSL bursts onto American and British high street coffee shops as boldly as it did the year before.
