Keeping up with coffee trends on TikTok is like viewing a fractured psyche. There are some strokes of brilliance in there that maybe wouldn’t have come to exist without a screw or two not being fully tightened, and there are also some things that make me wonder if everyone is doing alright. The latest one falls more in the latter category. It’s a bucket of coffee. This isn’t hyperbole. It’s an actual bucket, filled with coffee.
The trend has become so popular that it has found its way to the pages of the New York Times. The genesis is a bit murky, but it appears to have begun with customers bringing in their own large format receptacles and asking the baristas to fill ‘er up with caffeinated something or other. It has since gone viral on the TikTok, and some shops are starting to offer their own takes on the coffee bucket.
Coffee shops in Missouri, Oklahoma, California, and Connecticut have come up with a spin on the XXL beverage. The throughline of the drink at each of these places is that it is 34 ounces and contains a latte-style drink that includes four shots of espresso. (Which is less than I thought it would be, if I’m being honest. I wasn’t expecting any sort of discretion.) At Dulce Vida, a Mexican-inspired coffee shop in Tulsa, “La Cubeta” will cost you $12, with an additional $2 if you want to add a flavor.
The drinks have become so popular that people are driving literal hours to get one. Coffee buckets currently make up 30% of all coffee orders at Dulce Vida.
But before we start blaming Gen Z for this, Tiffany Guckin, a Connecticut-based food content creator and director of operations at a research firm says that it’s a different generation jumping on this trend. “I think millennial moms in particular are looking for something to jazz up their days.” Meanwhile Andrea Hernández, a writer at food trends newsletter Snaxshot sees the emergence of the coffee bucket as a reaction to, and skepticism of, prior food trends. “We’re kind of experiencing that sort of backlash from what we were trying to do, like, less caffeine, more mindfulness, more meditation, less palpitations.”
There’s a certain opulence to the trend that is unsettling. I say this as a person who makes roughly 25 ounces of coffee every morning to be consumed in a single sitting. Which is probably more volume than the 34 ouncers because they have ice. Even still, this seems different. Maybe it’s the latte-ness of it all, but there’s a decadence teetering on nihilism in the coffee bucket that I don’t feel great about.
Maybe it’s that something like this inherently devalues the coffee itself, something the industry has so long worked to overcome. It feels spiritually closer to a beer trend from a few years back, where beer bros would buy the most expensive bomber they could just to pour it down the drain for The Gram, than it does to genuinely wanting to drink three 12-ounce lattes.
But also 12 bucks for 34 ounces of latte is not a bad deal, so sure why not, gimme a bucket of latte.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
