On Pumpkin Spice, Honestly

We are not going to pretend. For six weeks every year we drink a pumpkin spice latte at least once a week, and we enjoy it enough to tell you about it. The problem is not the drink. The problem is that the drink you buy down the road is sweet in a flat, uniform way, with a vanilla backbone and the ghost of a cinnamon stick, and nothing in it tastes like a spice that grew on a plant.

So we make our own syrup. It takes twenty minutes and keeps for a month in the fridge. Once you have it, the drink stops being a seasonal apology and becomes a small, honest pleasure.

The syrup

Here is the version we have settled on after three Octobers. It is loud enough that two tablespoons will carry a 240 ml latte without disappearing, and quiet enough that you can taste the coffee underneath. Which is the whole point.

• 200 g demerara or light brown sugar
• 200 g water
• 40 g pumpkin purée (the plain kind in a tin, not the pie-filling kind)
• 1 cinnamon stick, broken in half
• 4 whole cloves
• 4 green cardamom pods, cracked
• 1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon freshly grated ginger
• 1 vanilla pod, split, or 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• A pinch of flaky salt

Combine everything in a small saucepan. Bring it to a bare simmer, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Keep it there for ten minutes — do not let it rolling-boil, you will drive off the volatiles — then take it off the heat and let it sit for a full thirty minutes with the lid on. The second thirty minutes is where most of the flavour arrives. Do not skip it.

Strain through a fine sieve into a clean bottle. Press on the solids. You will have about 300 ml of a dark, lightly cloudy syrup that smells, correctly, of a cold morning. Keep it in the fridge. It will hold a month without complaint.

The drink

Two tablespoons of syrup into a warm cup. Pull a double shot of espresso directly onto it; the heat lifts the aromatics the moment they meet the puck’s crema. Stir once. Steam 180 to 200 ml of whole milk to the texture you would use for a flat white — glossy, no large bubbles, warm but not scalding — and pour. The syrup is dark enough that latte art is honestly a bit lost in it, so we do not try. A small dusting of fresh nutmeg on top is not a cliché if the nutmeg is fresh.

If you take it as filter, two teaspoons of syrup into the mug before you pour over works. It is a different drink — flatter, more autumnal, more of a desk coffee — but a good one for a cold afternoon.

A note on the pumpkin

You can leave the pumpkin out. The syrup will still work and nobody will know. What the pumpkin does is give the drink a slightly savoury roundness that makes it feel like food instead of candy. If you make the syrup twice this season — and you will — try one of each. The pumpkin version is quietly better.

And the shop version

Buy one if you like. We will not judge. But keep a bottle of the real thing in the door of your fridge. The first time a friend tries a proper pumpkin spice latte, made out of actual spices, is a small conversion event. We have made more converts to home espresso with this syrup than with any other single thing we have ever brewed.

The season is short. Make a batch.