I have many flavors and ingredients that, when spotted on a menu, are instant purchases for me. Papaya, starfruit, and passionfruit, to name a few. Mixed with nostalgia and rarity, I just adore tropical fruits and East Asian flavors. Black sesame, to me, used to be a rare flavor that I could occasionally experience in a crisp form or as a paste inside tang yuans. Lately, I’ve had it in ice cream, mochi donuts, and cheesecake. Normally, it’s found in food items but when I tasted it in a cappuccino? It became my longstanding favorite hot drink at Breadbelly, a perfect mix of the black sesame flavor and lightly sweetened (my cold favorite is the yuzu Americano).

As multicultural as the US is, specialty coffee’s rise to stardom has been slow to catch up. Consumers are now more educated on coffee than ever and more open to what used to be tagged as “exotic” flavors.

All around me in San Francisco are cafes and pop-ups owned and operated by a wide ethnic diversity of people. Instead of trying to fit into the mold, they’re breaking them and throwing them out. People are leaning into all of the flavors, providing nostalgia to those familiar to them and curiosity for those who aren’t. At Paper Son Coffee, there’s a “Guava Pillow” drink with “tart coffee soda, topped with guava puree foam.” It tastes as amazing as it sounds and is a multi-sensory experience—every sip you take makes you dip your nose into the guava puree scent. The purple drink in the photo above is the “Ube Butter Cake” at Filipino-owned Side Practice Coffee in Chicago: espresso, ube miso caramel syrup, banana milk. Utterly unique and beautiful.

In 2022, Yemeni cafe Delah Coffee in Berkeley was the first of its kind in the area, offering drinks mixed with spices like cardamom, ginger, and cinnamon. Reflecting Yemen’s cafe culture and in direct contrast to most Bay Area specialty cafes’ closing times (early afternoon), Delah is open until 10 pm.

Even syrup company Monin has taken notice: last year, the company proclaimed ube to be the flavor of the year, and this year, it’s yuzu. I haven’t tried the syrup flavors, so I can’t speak to the accuracy, but Monin is a 113-year-old company, so you can imagine the trends they’ve seen.

Another syrup company, Proper, hosts a coffee sig drinks competition at Expo. This year’s winner pulled from his Cuban immigrant roots and travels to create a standout, refreshing summer drink that featured a clarified milk punch banana base, indicative of spiked banana bread.

A limeade-coffee drink I had in Taiwan this summer (Taiwan had fruit in coffee for many years before it arrived in the US).

This sea of change is a culmination of a fresh specialty coffee generation wanting more, social media’s influence and reach across oceans, and a receptive audience. The fruit-in-coffee drink trend in the US is thanks to years of exposure in East Asia. Even the tea universe isn’t immune: take a look at matcha’s soaring popularity, which is driving an upcoming shortage in Japan.

It’s about time that US palates start expanding beyond vanilla and caramel—nothing against those flavors, there are just a lot more to explore! I, for one, am cheering on all the new coffee business owners who are leaning into their cultural roots and influencing coffee sig drinks for the better.

This article was written as part of my brand ambassador work with HostMilano.

“Cultural infusions” is a topic I’ve been meaning to explore in my newsletter. Hopefully, this overview leads to a more in-depth exploration of what goes into mixing flavors and creating new sig drinks.