Here’s the thing. I think at some point we elder Millennials need to understand when our time as come and gone and that, for the world’s sake, we should log off. We had a good run. We Harlem Shaked (Shook?), We Can Has Cheezburgered, hell we fought the good fight for avocado toast everywhere so that future generations didn’t have to. But at some point we need to accept that the internet doesn’t need us anymore.
Case in point: Christina Tosi. Tosi is the creator of the extremely Millennial-coded Milk Bar. The award-winning bakery is known for nostalgia-heavy sweet treats, elevating the flavors with unconventional combinations. But Milk Bar is perhaps best known for its cereal milk, whereby cereal is allowed to get soggy in milk to impart its flavor and then used most notably to make soft serve ice cream.
Cereal milk had a whole moment in the late-aughts and early-2010s, with many cafes across the country using it for specialty cereal milk lattes in all sorts of flavors. Cornflakes, Froot Loops, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Fruity Pebbles, etc. But it’s back now in carbonated form. And I say this with all due respect and understanding that I am part of the problem, but the Millennials must be stopped.
View this post on Instagram
The cereal milk revival, now in bubbly form, also comes thanks to Tosi, who recently shared a recipe with here 550,000 Instagram followers. It’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s cereal milk that’s then been carbonated with a Soda Stream. And my greatest fear is that it will find its way to coffee shops.
Cereal milk lattes? Delicious. Carbonated coffee drinks like an espresso tonic? Yes and yes. But a sparkling cereal milk latte? A thousand times no. It’s a weight thing. The drink can be sparkling and light or thick and rich. But not both. Never both. The mere idea makes me lactose intolerant.
And I’m not saying all of Gen Z’s coffee concoctions are top tier. The scallion latte, and the whole dark cuisine trend in general, it’s something. Their best “creation”, orange juice and espresso, has been created by no less than two generations before them. But Millennials, this one’s a real unforced error on our part.
Luckily there’s still time to right the ship. We’re the cafe owners now and it is our responsibility to keep this one to the confines of the internet. We must stop this before it breaks containment. Milk must never be carbonated. Not for coffee, not ever. Please, Millennials, let’s not YOLO this one.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
