What you should do with it is not drink it.

Avoid it at all costs.

My stomach agrees. It’s making very loud and angry noises right now.

Thanks.

The “golden latte” is not a new idea. Trendy big city cafes have been putting turmeric in coffee ever since ancient gurus discovered the nourishing properties of the spice (about 2016). Matcha is ground green tea that usually replaces coffee rather than adding to it, and is said to give you a calmer buzz than caffeine alone. Both powders have an earthy flavour, like you’re sucking the healing energy straight from a pile of dirt.

I decided to mix both turmeric and matcha into a latte. I call it the “Electrum Latte” because apparently green gold actually exists, and is called electrum. Electrum Latte copyright, 2017, me.

Anyway, here’s the recipe. Follow along carefully:

1. Scoop turmeric and matcha into a latte

Good job, you did it! Those diseases will be running for their lives in no time.

Martha Stewart has a recipe for a golden latte, and she recommends making your own yellowish almond milk by straining ground almonds and water through a “nut bag.” Unfortunately, all I have is normal cow-based milk, and the only “nut bag” I own is probably not what she has in mind.

I did the normal espresso and steamed milk thing, then sweetened this with honey, because it seemed like the right thing to do.

The result is a surprisingly normal-looking and delicious latte. It straddles the line between drink and food, because the turmeric can make it taste a bit like sipping the extra curry after you run out of rice. But honestly, I love curry, and it doesn’t clash with the coffee as much as you’d think (as I discovered in PWTIC’s first official success story, Curry Coffee). The matcha mostly disappears flavour-wise, though it would probably give you an extra kick if you’re sensitive to caffeine, since it’s just about doubling the amount.

And in case you didn’t catch the sarcasm, this won’t actually cure any maladies. There’s a small amount of evidence that the ingredients in turmeric and matcha are good for you, but not enough for gurus to be declaring them miracle cures and selling overpriced versions of them. Gwyneth Paltrow can go screw herself with a matcha-coloured egg.

They taste good, though, so, drink up.

An espresso machine. Obviously this opens up hundreds, if not billions, of new possibilities for this blog.

First on the list: a maple bacon latte. It’s not the most original idea, but bacon has been a longtime frienemy of PWTIC, and whenever someone asks “what’s the best thing you’ve tried in coffee?” I usually say it’s the Smoked Paprika and Maple Latte. A maple bacon latte could combine all that goodness, if it works. And now I can make a real latte with espresso and steamed milk.

I also happened to have some of this in my fridge. It says “no artificial flavours,” but it’s worth noting that bacon is not in the list of ingredients. So I guess they consider fake bacon to be non-artificial. 100% genuine facon. Whatever; it’s the smokiness that matters here, and it has lots of that.

The steamed milk provides a beautiful marbling of foam and crema, just like in bacon, except it came from the cow’s boobs instead of its flesh. Cool.

If I had bacon bits and whipped cream I’d put those on top to make this post more visually appealing, but, sorry, I didn’t. Please use your imagination.

I used about a tablespoon of the syrup, and it’s just sweet enough for me. The facon flavouring appears as a smokey aftertaste to the maple, providing a multi-level taste adventure. This is honestly one of the best weird coffees I’ve created here. I deem it a success!

Stay tuned for more espresso-based successes and horrible failures.

Put some pot in your pot. Get a buzz with your buzz. Yep, marijuana in coffee is now a thing. FYI.

I’ll be sure to bring you a hands-on (mouth-on? Ew) review as soon as they legalize it here in Canada.

Many kind commenters suggested something called PB2, and I ignored them for seven years, until I came across the concoction in Costco last week. PB2 is like peanut butter, but one louder. It’s also powdered, which means you have to add liquid to it to make it go. As a coffee expert, I can tell you one thing for certain: coffee is a liquid.

I put about a tablespoon in. Maybe more. Maybe a lot more. I wanted my first experience with peanut butter’s sequel to be memorable, okay?

It appeared to immediately mix right in with the coffee, which is what I was going for. Even a blender could not properly mix PB1 into coffee (as demonstrated in the peanut butter and jelly coffee incident of 2009), so this was quite exciting. I’d done it. I’d won. Here is a dot GIF file to demonstrate my feeling at the time:

And it tasted great, too. The second peanut butter’s flavour was subtle, but delicious. Even with the substandard coffee I’d used, it was elevated by the nuttiness and an extra creaminess that transcended the small amount of cream I’d added.

As I suspected all along, the flavour of peanut butter goes perfectly with the flavour of coffee. It was only texture holding me back before.

Then I got to the bottom. I felt a disturbance in the force. There was something solid down there. I brought my mug into the light to investigate further. Here is a dot GIF file of the moment I realized my coffee had broken bad.

Chunks. Always chunks. They follow me wherever I go, lurking under every surface. One cannot escape chunks any more than one can escape death.

I give PB2 in coffee four and a half out of five stars.

Fuckoffee. Brilliant.

The attitude carries over into everything the coffee shop does. Their chalk signs are equally uninhibited, and they mock legal threats to the name, recently changing it to F*ckoffee. Their Twitter account alternates between outright telling people to fuck off and offending them in more subtle ways.

Personally, I’m not sure how a word that most people hear every day can be genuinely offensive, especially when mixed with coffee. As we’ve seen here on PWTIC, things are always less offensive when mixed with coffee.

(Okay, not always).