Back at Starbucks

As your typical young person, I love sitting at coffeeshops sipping a latte. This behaviour inspired me to write my first poetry book called Drinking Poetry. I like the atmosphere of a good coffee shop because it helps me unwind and also focus on work. As part of my stint with 20 cogs, I joined many research panels. Many of them, I haven’t done a lot to get the rewards from them. But with one market research panel, I got a £10 gift card from Starbucks.

This year’s new drinks for the Starbucks summer menu looked really interesting. I was drawn to the Pink Coconut Refresha because of the strawberries in it. On the poster, it looked so cool with the strawberry milk and the strawberries floating at the top. Like a lot of food amd drinks, they don’t always look as pretty as they do in the pictures, but as long as it tastes alright, I don’t care!

The pink coconut drink reminded me of the Strawberry Sakura Latte I had in Japan. As I am a big fan of Japanese cuisine, I love these flavours. Halfway through both drinks, I did mix the two together in one cup, and it did make me feel like I was in Japan after drinking it. I’ve seen some links online on how to make these yourself at home and it’s something I wanna try.

It makes me wish Starbucks in the UK did bubble teas now. A lot of my favourite beverages at home are ones that I would love to make myself, but they never quite taste the same. Matcha at Starbucks can be hit or miss. Sometimes they either put too much or not enough in and it looks like green slush. This time it seemed good.

For me, I think matcha and dairy milk don’t mix. When I’ve looked on blogs dedicated to matcha I found out the Matcha and the dairy milk cancel out each other’s benefits. Anyway, I think Matcha lattes taste nicer with milks like coconut, almond and oat.

Other than the two great drinks I had, I also had somebody compliment my Eevee bag which was really cool. You can always tell who is a fan of Pokémon and who isn’t. People that aren’t fans of Pokémon will mistake Eevee for Pikachu. Eevee is already a popular Pokémon in its own right, but is well loved among the community for its various forms. I even once wrote an article about how Eevee was the ultimate LGQTQ+ icon.

Overall, I had a lovely experience drinking at Starbucks. I’ve been a few times where I ordered on the app and picked it up because the indoor seating was closed, but it felt so dead. It’s nice to be invited to coffee shops again. There’s a lot of them in Banbury now. If I can describe Banbury in a short sentence it would be this: it’s full of charity and coffee shops.

Because nearly every major city in the world has a Starbucks, being in there feels like a metropolitan privilege. Some drinks there make me feel like I am in New York, Milan or Paris. Some flavour drinks just represent a country’s culture so well.

My drink of choice is normally a matcha latte and I will always ask for non-dairy milks if possible. I’m happy that it’s still on the Starbucks menu all year round. The other drink was nice, but I don’t think I will miss it when it’s off the menu because I think I might be able to make it at home with some strawberries, coconut milk and ice.