La Colombe's New Honeysuckle Draft Latte Is the Only Good Spring Gimmick

Every Friday, we're publishing This Good Thing, where we'll feature a restaurant dish, store-bought food item, kitchen tool, or food-adjacent obsession that we can't stop thinking about.

Working in food media, it's easy to grow exhausted with the inundation of seasonal gimmicks of the pumpkin-spice-cheese variety; ordinarily delicious foods are tweaked beyond recognition with the hopes of becoming newsworthy. Oreo, Starbucks, and more American food brands have become experts at the catchy new flavors game, and while many of them are successful—Fruity Pepple Oreos are a delight—they rarely have staying power.

For these reasons, plus inbox fatigue, I was skeptical of La Colombe's April 16 launch of Honeysuckle Draft Lattes. La Colombe is one of my favorite coffee roasters in the country, as I grew up frequenting the café in their Philadelphia headquarters, but I wondered how honeysuckle essence could improve upon their already-excellent draft lattes, which are simply cold-pressed espresso and velvetty froathed milk. I soon discovered that a whisper of floral flavor made the foamy canned drink even lovelier.

For the uninitiated, a draft latte is quite simply a latte served on-tap, like a draft beer. La Colombe, which is credited with pioneering the first-ever draft latte, has rolled out canned versions for retail, and somehow, those still maintain the frothy airiness of a latte fresh from the tap. The spring-pegged addition of honeysuckle is their newest variation to hit the market.

I've come to expect flower-flavored things to be cloyingly sweet—floral notes can be so delicate and understated that people feel the need to amplify them with too much sugar—but the honeysuckle lattes are still just-sweet-enough, and may actually be too unsweetened for some palates. A whole can only has four grams of sugar.

The product, which retails at a suggested price of $2.99, was launched as a result of last year’s “Craft the Next Draft” campaign, where La Colombe customers voted on their dream seasonal flavor. I am pleased to report that, this time, America got it right. The lattes are available online and at La Colombe locations nationwide.

The can is very cute, too.