Give Any Starbucks Order The PSL Treatment With This Simple Tip

Every year as autumn approaches, so too does the Starbucks fall menu, and it recently released items for 2026. Some items change every year, but the iconic pumpkin spice latte is a perennial favorite. And that delicious fall flavor doesn't just have to be in a PSL, or any of Starbucks' assorted official pumpkin drinks. You can make any drink a pumpkin drink by just knowing what to ask for.

Starbucks' pumpkin-flavored drinks use some combination of pumpkin spice cold foam, powdered topping, or thick sauce. Do note that Starbucks sauces and syrups are not the same, with the former being used for thick, creamy, strong-flavored drinks. Starbucks doesn't have pumpkin syrup, so for a lighter flavor, request the powdered pumpkin spice topping. Cold foam falls somewhere in the middle, with clear creaminess but relatively light flavor.

The good news is that since coffee and pumpkin are natural flavor partners, there are countless options for adding this fall flavor. Try two pumps of pumpkin sauce and a dash of sweet cream in a Brown Sugar Oat Milk Shaken Espresso. Or, to play off of the official Iced Pumpkin Cream Chai, add pumpkin topping or sauce to a hot chai latte. The fall menu's Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew can also be spruced up by requesting nitro cold brew instead. Some even swear by a Pumpkin Strawberry Acai Refresher, made by adding 4 sauce pumps to the standard drink. Be adventurous.

A big part of Starbucks' omnipresence among pumpkin-flavored coffee has to do with who invented the pumpkin spice latte. It's commonly credited to a Starbucks research and development team, which first tested the famous version in fall 2003. But that same autumn also saw other coffee shops debut their own pumpkin spice lattes or syrups.PSLs were advertised as early as 2001, by a Portland, Oregon cafe (which has since become a Starbucks).

Perhaps the most interesting alternate origin story belongs to Tori Amos. In 1997, the singer quipped to Seattle alt-weekly "The Rocket" that "You have all your Starbucks things ... Well, I have one that tastes like pumpkin pie. It's my own invention; it's my contribution to Halloween. A little witch warmer!" To date, Amos never revealed her witch warmer recipe, so it's unknown how similar it actually is to the pumpkin pie-ish Starbucks coffee.

However, Starbucks has published what exactly is in the pumpkin spice sauce that makes the eponymous latte possible. Unsurprisingly, it contains an assortment of autumnal spices and a considerable amount of sugar. But the creaminess it adds to drinks comes entirely from pumpkin puree, as the recipe does not contain actual cream or dairy products of any kind. The enduring popularity of Starbucks' pumpkin drinks suggests it isn't needed.