☕Review - La Colombe - Vanilla Draft Latte

La Colombe - Vanilla Draft Latte canned in front of some plants

This ready-to-drink canned latte from Philadelphia coffee institution, La Colombe offers a sweet cold brew experience in a convenient package. La Colombe uses a in-can oxygen barrier to keep it fresh and Nitrous Oxide to help create a micro-foam head and silky texture. Marketed as a cleaner alternative to typical bottled coffee drinks, it has a simple ingredient list and uses sugar instead of corn syrup and real vanilla extract with around a third of the added sugar of the average RTD coffee. There is also added lactase to make it easier to digest for those with sensitivities to lactose (more recent iterations have gone lactose free). It comes in both 11oz. and 9oz. iterations both floating around $3-4.

🌍Origin: Single-origin Colombian beans

🔥Roast Level: Medium Roast. Specifically, they use their signature Espresso Roast profile (often associated with their Nizza blend characteristics).

🧪Brew Method: Cold-Pressed Espresso - The coffee is steeped as a cold brew (often overnight in oxygen-free stainless steel tanks) and then "cold-pressed" to create a highly concentrated espresso base, yielding a smoother, lower-acid profile than traditional heat-extracted espresso.

👅Experience: Vanilla dominates but you can still get a good foundation of the coffee itself. It is not quite as thick as a whole milk latte even with the Nitrous and is quite easy to drink. The level of sweetness is just about perfect, any more and the vanilla would be overbearing.

🏆 Score: 3.75/5 - Very Good - There is little to complain about here. La Colombe's Vanilla Draft Latte checks a good number of boxes, offering a convenient and satisfying flavored latte experience at around 2/3 the cost of a cafe made drink. For me, their standard cafe draft latte "Everyday" and triple are more coffee-forward and therefore more my forte, though vanilla lovers will likely place this can in the top spot.

💵Would buy again? Sure, though I tend to shop these on sale in spite of the quality.

⚖️Scale:

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