First stop: Starbucks.
Oh, Starbucks. I've chugged down many a PSL and a selection of their other sweetened espresso beverages throughout my college years, but as my tastes have grown to crave specialty roasts and rich chocolatey syrups (mochas are my go-to coffee drink), my Starbucks visits are much fewer these days.
As I am most familiar with Starbucks' offerings, I thought it would be a good place to establish a baseline for this taste test.
The Pike Place roast tasted like a typical black coffee.
This medium roast is described as having a "smooth, balanced, and rich flavor ... the perfect everyday coffee in a cup." I'm not a black coffee drinker (see mocha note above), so there wasn't anything that particularly stood out to me about this cup of coffee. It's more bitter than I like my coffee to be (it is black coffee, after all), but it wasn't unpleasant. Both my fiancé (who drinks black coffee) and I noted that it was just "fine."
The mocha tasted like a bland hot chocolate.
The whipped cream had melted into the drink by the time I took my first sip, and all I tasted was hot chocolate. It wasn't rich hot chocolate with decadent chocolatey flavors, but something more Swiss Miss-like. It was bland and tasted more of milk than chocolate, and there was no coffee flavor to be found.
The caramel Frappuccino was deliciously decadent.
Last up was the caramel Frappuccino, which I had high hopes for, as Starbucks Frappuccinos are an icon in the frozen coffee drink category — and it did not disappoint. It was definitely sweet, but there was a hint of bitterness coming from the coffee that helped to balance the sweetness, and the whipped cream had a nice, thick consistency.
My only critique is that it’s a bit watery, but I couldn't help taking a few extra sips of this one before moving on.
Next, we tried the coffees from McDonald's.
McCafé is the line of coffee and espresso drinks at McDonald's. I was pleasantly surprised to find a solid array of coffeehouse classics, including caramel macchiatos, cappuccinos, lattés, and iced coffees.
I ordered a small coffee ($1.29), a mocha ($2.00), and a caramel frappé ($2.00).
A quick note on prices (as $2.00 is a steal for an espresso drink), this seems to be a limited-time offer at participating McDonald's.
The McDonald's coffee tasted like a typical cup of black coffee.
Again, I'm no coffee connoisseur, and black coffee just isn't my thing. My fiancé noted that he found McDonalds' coffee to be a bit bitter and said it had a slightly burned taste, as if it had been left on the pot for too long.
The mocha was delicious, but it didn’t taste like a mocha.
I was delighted to find the whipped cream still intact when I took the first sip of McDonald's mocha. At first the bittersweet chocolate drizzle dominated my palate, but as I continued to sip, I detected a hint of coffee flavor as well as other flavors that I had difficulty nailing down. Vanilla? Caramel? Condensed milk?
In any case, it was delicious, but points off for not tasting like a mocha.
The caramel frappé tasted like a straight-up milkshake.
This drink was definitely creamier than the icy Starbucks Frappuccino, but it dangerously toed the line between frozen coffee drink and coffee milkshake. Like the mocha, I felt like there was a bit of an identity crisis here, but (also like the mocha) it was delicious.
Dunkin' was our last stop.
I've been to Dunkin' Donuts before, but it's not my first choice. The syrups have always been too sweet for me (and I have a pretty big sweet tooth), the doughnuts disappointing, and while we’re not taking ambiance into account for this ranking, the scene at DD has never been inspiring. But I pushed all that aside in the name of this taste test.
I ordered a small coffee ($2.39), a latté with a mocha swirl ($3.29), and a frozen coffee with a caramel swirl ($3.39).
The coffee was served super hot.
I waited for the coffee to cool down a little so as to not scald my tongue before tasting. It tasted like it had been sitting a bit too long in its pot and gotten stale and burnt. The taste was one-dimensional to me, and my fiancé commented that it was watery.
The mocha had a nice foam layer and a perceptible coffee taste.
Finally, a mocha that actually tasted like a mocha. I thought it had a good balance of bitter (from the coffee flavor) and sweet, and it was much more chocolatey than the others.
The frozen caramel coffee had the best texture — but a strange aftertaste.
I really wanted this one to sweep the frozen drink category as the texture was on point — not too watery and not milkshake-like, but the perfect in-between. Even the whipped cream was the perfect middle ground between Starbucks' super thick whipped cream and McDonald's thinner one, but the caramel threw me off with its weird aftertaste. I took several sips and even cleansed my palate with some water and black coffee, but I couldn't shake it.