We have game-changing news for you in time for your afternoon coffee break: there’s a certain secret-menu Starbucks drink you’re going to want to order. Perfect for these dropping temperatures across much of the country, beverages don’t get much more peak fall than — drumroll, please — the Caramel Apple Pumpkin Spice Drink. When autumnal visions of caramel apples and all things pumpkin-flavored are dancing in your head, Starbucks has you covered.
As Bustle reported, Starbucks just made this drink not-so-secret by including it in their own blog post, 10 ways to spice up your Fall order at Starbucks. Consider us eternally grateful, because what a waste of autumn this would have been if we just continued through life not knowing that we could combine two of the most delicious offerings from the coffee chain?
The breakdown is this: Starbucks has the Caramel Apple Spice Drink, which not many people know about because it isn’t a coffee or tea drink. It’s steamed apple juice with cinnamon syrup, whipped cream and caramel sauce drizzle. It sounds like a leaf-crunching dream in and of itself, but as we now know, it can get even better. Starbucks let us in on this hack, recommending we order the Caramel Apple Spice Drink with two shots of pumpkin sauce in it. (They recommend this with the grande size, if you’re curious about proportions.) Voila, your caramel apple concoction now has pumpkin, too, for the ultimate fall trifecta.
Bustle noted that you could also swap two of the four cinnamon pumps already in the Caramel Apple Spice Drink (pictured above) for pumpkin pumps if you don’t want to overload on sweetness, but that upon trying the drink just as Starbucks advises, the beverage actually isn’t over the top or cloying. That’s all we need to hear to be sold on a combination of caramel, apple, pumpkin, cinnamon and whipped cream.
Some of the other hacks Starbucks revealed include getting a Pumpkin Spice Latte with two shots of white chocolate mocha sauce, which is similar to a certain viral Cinderella Latte we've written about, adding pumpkin spice pumps to the Java Chip Frappuccino (will do!), and tricking out the Teavana Shaken Iced Black Tea with coconut milk, two pumpkin spice pumps and two cinnamon dolce sauce pumps (on our way!).
For all the PSL haters out there who think a warming pumpkin spice drink is too #basic, Starbucks just might be proving that there are ways to make your order anything but boring.
