Beefing w/ Layered Drinks & Going Viral w/ Blue Matcha

Yo, happy Summer Sundayyyy. I’m eating matcha ice cream and falafel, listening to Silversun Pickups and typing this up on break because our bread baker is taking a holiday and I’ve got an hour where I’d normally be driving downtown to grab sourdough. Cucumbers rock. etc. Let’s talk about why I hate layered iced drinks, and why we have two on our summer menu this year anyways.

My beef with most layered drinks.

So mainly, I hate how if you stick a straw in you’re getting a sip of exactly one layer, and that first sip could be bad.

Why is it bad? The cheapest and easiest way to do a beautiful layered drink, is to just not mix in the espresso or matcha shot or whatever. Milk first, ice, shot on top. Then you get a nice white canvas of milk and a splash of coffee. good lava lamp cascade. Here’s the problem with that. It makes the top of the drink all watery and warm, god forbid you sip from the top. If you do that upside down, then the straw goes in to hot ‘spro, and hot coffee up a straw is pretty bad too.

Now even if you’re doing this with cold ‘spro or some cold brew, even if you’re only doing coffee and milk, unmixed is no good. It’s too easy to sip enough of the cream in a black coffee or espreso in a latte, that you mess up the ratio. People who want a latte don’t want to sip black espresso, and once they do they’re taking a third of a shot away, now the drink is too milky.

Beyond the black coffee, let’s say you’ve got an espresso drink with a few different layers of interesting flavors. they’ve got to taste good individually and together to avoid this problem.

Again, it’s super easy to have two of those layers be milk and espresso, it looks so aesthetic, so nice; Don’t fall for the trap. You can be more creative; Shake the spro with some honey and ice, mix the milk with some strawberry syrup, keep the colors change the flavors if you’ve gotta’ separate those colors!

I recognize some people like their drinks separated, shout out dunkin’ donuts using raw sugar in their iced coffee. Unhinged, but for some people it’s fun. I just think it’s not as good as it could be, and that’s the point!

Here’s what we did with our latte.

I’ll start with the latte, our “Johnny Guavo.” We always source ingredients first, and we knew we wanted guava this year. So we commit to like $500 of guava to start, then hit a wall. The problem we ran in to was that Guava acts a lot like a white grape juice, it stands on it’s own but will totally disappear in to anything else you add it to. You can add more but all it does it make things sweeter. So we decided to take the jam we were given, make it a little brighter, but keep it super thick so it would always sink but still go through a straw.

Then we had a guava bottom which was good, but there wasn’t much color and it went away as soon as you drank it like boba. So we wanted to add more. We settled on cream cheese honey guava pastries as the inspiration. But If we made the latte part a honey/cream cheese latte, it was like basically ice cream with an invisible jam bottom, and then jam was too dull to stand out flavor-wise too. The whole thing was too sweet.

So we needed more visual contrast and a less sweet latte. We went back to the red velvet latte with cream cheese icing foam from the previous summer. We’d use that cheese top, but change the name to “cheesecake cold foam” because Americans fear “cheese foam” despite boba shops normalizing it. We’re always having this conversation on how to pair our ideas with something people understand, like how last summer we did an ube foam with dragonfruit powder because more people had a positive perception of dragonfruit flavor than ube.

Now remember we want every sip to be good. So if we have a cheese top, and a guava bottom. We don’t want the middle to be a plain latte. In an effort to make the bulk of the drink "not too sweet” we went with a half sweet brown sugar honey latte. The brown sugar is also giving pastry bread..

The number one question whenever you have a drink with a lot of sweet ingredients is “is it super sweet?” so getting to say it’s “mostly a half sweet latte” has helped.

Agave on the sides gives it some visual intrigue and drips down to make the guava bottom more opaque which also helps. Great drink.

Here’s how and why we made the blue drink.

I’ve known about blue and purple drinks for awhile. Butterfly pea flowers were everywhere on cocktail Instagram in the 2010’s, blue when steeped in hot water and purple when you add an acid like lemon juice. For a little while in 2019 I was one of the few people growing organic butterfly pea flowers by the hundreds here in FL, when it was really hard to buy them. They don’t really work at volume in coffee world, like I mentioned they weren’t easy to buy when they were hot, but the color also dilutes easily in milk. Smoothie and acai shops particularly in south florida were using spirulina from a brand/product called “e3 live” that really popularized food use from Algae around Oregon. If you blend it up with fruit it always adds a little blue tinge.

I think the first time I saw solid blue phycocyanin (via spirulina) in a drink, was at a pop up dayglow coffee was doing at a clothing store in LA around 2021/22? They had these pure blue and white hot latte art cups going out. They looked totally different, not diluted at all. They took me down a rabbit hole of figuring out how to match that exact color.

I should note e3live also has a pure spirulina called “blue majik” which had a lot of grifting going on around it, not entirely their fault though without getting in to it.

I spent some time going back and forth with different salesman on proof of purchase and transparency until we found a genuinely organic and specific import of phycocyanin, as I’d heard negative press around contamination from this stuff. It’s basically a chlorophyll from a type of Cyanobacteria, Cyanobacteria being the algae that grows on top of bodies of water (read this if you want some insight on the typical bad press)

As usual starting with quality ingredients put us on the right path. It was crazy blue, and salty. Yea along with sodium it’s also high in potassium and protein, it’s essentially a sea vegetable blend. I’d just read a lot about why sea veggie farming is actually awesome in this excellent book “eat like a fish.” Anyways.

We had the color right away, at about half the cost of our “green matcha.” We ended up putting the “blue matcha” in quotes too as a way to sell the stuff but acknowledge it’s not really matcha. On that topic, chinese matcha which is also not technically matcha is getting pretty good too. Anyways, again.

We wanted to go with something that spoke to the ocean because the color was so true blue.

The clearest contrast was coconut cream, which would hold it’s white color and body against the blue, and the clearest way to embrace the salt was to add more. Coconut is elevated by warm spices, and they would also add clarity to the salt. Cinnamon/clove/anise were too fall, so we went with cardamom. We shake the blue by itself so it foams up, then the coconut cream on top looks extra smooth by contrast. little flaky salt, bam.

I’m making it sound so easy, but we were playing around with this for like two months haha. The spirulina by itself was so bland, it’s taste would dissapear in to almost anything. How do you start with nothing? Outside of ocean salt, we were ultimately inspired by customers ordering non-dairy blueberry lavender iced matcha. By adding blueberry lavender to the drink we now had essentially the customer fave matcha under a different name, and it felt really natural for them to order it.

We actually serve this drink without a lid, the flaky salt bubbles on top and has a fun texture with a crunchy cardamom, the coconut cream and blueberry lavender layers have great flavor. The drink looks good and tastes good mixed or separate. Excellent layered drink.

We put it out, made our seasonal video, and then our friend Miho took a video that got 150k views in a week, for comparison a typical very good video we do gets like 4k.

This all worked really well, because those people came to our page after and saw the new menu too, but it did mess up our par sheets. Groups of newcomers would come in right before close and just ask for “the blue drink.” Then at the end of the day, we’d be making more of the stuff hoping it would sell the same volume tomorrow.

Sometimes we do weird drinks, we have a really spicy one this summer. Not every drink is for everyone. This time though, as long as they knew it had coconut, we felt our blue coconut cream was really good and it would blow their socks off. We just needed a lot of it. And a lot of blue spirulina.

This is when your margins really get killed, when you buy stuff last minute.

Miho who took that video works at trader joes where we got coconut cream, and helped us order multiple cases overnight. Then we were doing a combination of amazon and demanding direct wholesale to fill in the blue hole. Along with buying more glass matcha tea mixers as we were breaking ours on the weekend volume. We sunk a little bit in to getting this rolling but didn’t invest all we had.

We use glass / foodsafe plastic, because we can see clearly if it’s all dissolved and neither are porous like wood or stone.

We kept up better than last holiday season, when matcha was first blowing up in our area. It’s better than overnight shipping or running out for expensive last minute cup lids & milk gallons during a rush. It was just storing so much bulk of new ingredients, it meant finding a creative way to prep them too. Suddenly all of our 4qt cambros meant for making syrups and foams were being used for backup coconut cream.

It’s also interesting if you’re offsetting the costs of one expensive drink for another, thankfully it wasn’t a really high cost item that was popping off.

I also think about how people’s first impression is a really strange drink, we’re not exactly attracting coffee geeks but we do a lot of colorful produce based items too.

Also lots of people filming us without permission or filming us until we look up and then putting their phones away. No biggie.

Thanks for reading! Have a great Summmer everyone - Elias :)