Neapolitan - February's Decadent Signature Beverage

RIP Blood Orange. Hello Neapolitan!

Every month at Clarity we'll be launching a new specialty drink. 

December saw a Peppermint Mocha for the holidays. We used a loose leaf peppermint tea via T, An Urban Teahouse as the base for a bright chocolate sauce. Both festive and absurdly delicious. 

 In January, we welcomed the new year with a Blood Orange Latte. Blood oranges (and most citrus) are most plentiful during the winter months so it was an easy call. The hard part was stabilizing citrus for a milk based drink. Ultimately, we landed in a beautiful middle ground of delicate citrus notes and sweet steamed milk, all complimenting the fruity single origin espressos we had on bar. Dreamsicle City, USA. 

But that was last month. 

Now it's February and we have to stay fresh and creative so we juiced some passion fruits! After making about a dozen variations of a coffee-passionfruit combo and finding the flavors not pairing together well we went back to the drawing board. 

Dragonfruit! Dragonfruits are crazy looking and have spiky bits and also, as it turns out, are mostly water and make even your cortado taste like milk and fruit pulp. Pretty gross. 

Alright. back to the drawing board again. February means Valentine's Day is around the corner so we started thinking about seasonal flavors and chocolate strawberries and hot dang. 

Juice a million strawberries. Incorporate the juice into a sweet syrup and pair with a house made chocolate sauce. We're in business. 

As a latte, it was either overpowering sweetness or unrepresented, buried flavors. We retooled and built it into a cappuccino. Less milk to hide the fresh strawberry flavor meant more opportunity for the espresso to shine through the drink as a showcase flavor. 

Balanced. Sweet. Decadent but still fresh. Served with a strawberry on the side. 

Neapolitan.