One Christmas, working behind the bar at a cafe long before Inheritance existed, I decided to try something. I had red and green food coloring, and I started pouring rosettas as Christmas trees. The kids loved it in the hot chocolate. A few people told me it was the best thing they had seen all week. Then one of the regulars looked down at his cup and asked me a question I haven't forgotten.
So here is the part I would say before you pick a flavor for the season. Put the seasonal drink on the board as its own item, priced and named, and let people order it. The decision that will cost you something isn't which flavor you choose. It's whether that flavor ends up in a cup somebody did not ask for.
The safe version of a seasonal drink is one somebody has to ask for
Two different acts get called adding a seasonal drink, and they carry two different risks. The first is a new line on the menu, sitting beside what is already there. That version is opt-in. The only people who get it are the people who chose it, and if it doesn't sell, you're out some syrup and a line of board space.
The second is a season folded into a drink that already existed. The house latte quietly becomes a spiced house latte. A garnish goes on at the pass because it looks good going out. That version is opt-out, and the opt-out is never offered. It lands on the customer who orders the same drink every morning — the one still walking in during February, when the weather is bad and the visitors are gone.
If you want the upside without that risk, make it a thing people order by name. It's a small discipline and it costs nothing to keep.
Our cart menu changes one line and leaves the rest alone
You can see the shape of that on our cart's published menu. The coffee side doesn't move: espresso, cortado, cappuccino, latte, americano, with whole, almond and oat. Under Flavors there are four entries. Three of them are vanilla, caramel and chocolate. The fourth isn't a flavor at all. It's a slot, and it says Seasonal Rotation.
One slot is the whole budget. A second seasonal flavor has nowhere to go unless it pushes out vanilla, caramel or chocolate, so we turn down the second good idea every year, and at a booked event we tell people no to drinks a cafe down the road would happily make.
And if what you want to know is which flavor will sell in your town, I'm not the person to ask. We do not run a coffee shop. We say so on our page for cafes, because a cafe deserves to know whether its roaster is also its competitor, and it means I have no register of my own to check a seasonal drink against.
The garnish was mine, and the drink was his
Most people are looking for something they could not have put together at home, and garnishes are a good part of why a seasonal drink works at all. I still believe that. That Christmas, the trees mostly did work. Some garnishes carry a message other than the one you meant them to carry.
One of the regulars looked at his drink and asked, "Why did you put this poison in my drink?"
He hadn't asked for it, and neither had anyone else who got one. A few people that week told me it was the best thing they had seen. The number of people who requested it was zero.
I put it there because I thought it would be fun. It was my idea, my hands, my few seconds of something new in a shift that was otherwise identical to the one before it — and it went into his cup.
I thought he was being dramatic, and I brushed it off. He never came back. I never saw him again.
Working on a menu together
Building the drink menu is the first item on the cafe list at the page where we set out how we work with shops. There are no tiers or packages on it. An engagement starts with a conversation, and if you're holding a seasonal idea and aren't sure where to put it, that is a good conversation to start with.
