This is some of the most delicious news we've heard all year!
Most people know about coffee beans, right? You can buy them at the store, at specialty retailers, and the images of coffee beans being ground is sort of iconic. In fact, coffee beans are even spotted on shelves in perfume stores, and used to cleanse your olfactory nerves in between sniffing away at different fragrances!
However, what you might not realize is that when coffee is first beginning its life, it starts out inside something called a coffee cherry -- that's two pale, light green beans that are surrounded by a red, round, ripe fruit.
Starbucks knew, though. And for its first new beverage of 2017, it is debuting something called the Cascara Latte, which features flavors from the delightfully fragrant coffee cherry fruit.
Um, yas please.
The beverage was inspired by the Starbucks Reserve Roastery in Seattle, according to its press release, and will be available in U.S. stores starting on Jan. 10, 2017, all the way through the winter while supplies lasts.
"Cascara is Spanish for ‘husk,’ and we are taking the fruit of the coffee cherry to give our latte a subtle, lightly sweet flavor," Erin Marinan from Starbucks Beverage Research and Development team said on the press release page.
"Inside each coffee cherry are the seeds we’ve all come to know as coffee beans," reads the product description on the Starbucks website. "Cascara is the dried fruit of the cherry itself. It lends delicious, subtle notes of dark brown sugar and luscious maple."
The latte will consist of espresso, steamed milk and cascara syrup, which sounds totally divine, and then will be sprinkled with a delicate line of cascara topping, made from cascara extract and cane sugar. When you view the beverage from the top down, the design actually looks like the inside of a coffee bean.
How innovative!
Starbucks also announces that fans of the Smoked Butterscotch Latte are in luck, because the chain is bringing it back for a limited time starting Jan. 6, 2017.
Enjoy!