‘Points for repulsive flavor combinations’: Meet the Buffalo sauce latte

Perhaps convinced by Starbucks that coffee drinkers will ingest anything as long as the schtick is good enough, coffee and doughnut chain Tim Hortons unleashed a monster of an espresso drink on Thursday.

The Buffalo Latte is made with espresso, steamed milk, mocha and ... Buffalo “sauce flavor,” according to AdAge, and the whipped topping has a dusting of “zesty Buffalo seasoning.”

For now, the drink is only available in two locations – both in New York, with one in Buffalo for obvious reasons – and starts at $2.79, AdAge reports.

“Tim Hortons and Buffalo sauce were both born in 1964, so why not take these two Buffalo staples and combine them?” said Tim Hortons U.S.’ regional president, Stephen Goldstein, in a statement to AdAge.

It’s not the chain’s first foray intro novelty, according to Munchies.

“It's just part of something we've been doing lately,” Rebecca Lee, a manager at one of the locations that will sell the Buffalo Latte, told Munchies, a food website from VICE media. “For Mother's Day, we did a doughnut bouquet. For Canada Day, we did a poutine doughnut. We really want to spark customer interest.”

News of the concoction has been met with an equal amount of amazement and disdain.

Greg Morabito,‏ an editor at Eater, gave the drink a 6.5 rating on Eater’s newly created Ridiculous Novelty Beverage Scale. The latte got three points for “repulsive flavor combinations” and another three because “it’s not hard to imagine Justin Bieber drinking one of these.”

It lost three points for not leaning into the idea hard enough.

“Where’s the blue cheese element? How about some celery salt, or even a celery stalk? Maybe throw in a Wet-Nap to complete the picture?” he wrote in the Eater article.

One is left to wonder – when we will see the sriracha latte?

This story was originally published October 13, 2017 at 3:01 PM with the headline "‘Points for repulsive flavor combinations’: Meet the Buffalo sauce latte."