As much as I love cereal, it’s hardly a heartwarmer. On rainy days such as these, when the air is thick with mossy malaise and the rooftop drums in staccato spurts, a chilly lightning bolt of sugary milkiness straight to the gut isn’t as satisfying as a deep glug of hot coffee—the kind that blossoms in your belly like a rollicking rafflesia. Well, minus the corpse stench, of course.
I’ve long been a religious coffee drinker for such reasons of inner immolation, and while I’ve reviewed my fair share of cereal-flavored coffee creamers, never once could I even conceive that there’d be straight-up cereal-steeped coffee beans. That was until Empty Bowl listener Tasha tipped me off about Bones Coffee—a company known for outlandish small-batch coffee flavors like PB&J or Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream—and their Electric Unicorn blend. Not a new flavor but a recently reformulated one, Electric Unicorn coffee is said to be flavored like fruity cereal. As this is a nebulous bit of nomenclature that could refer to anything from Froot Loops to Raisin Bran (technically), I felt it was up to me to find out whether these beans live up to the brouhaha behind them.
Yep, that’s coffee. Not sure how to show this stuff attractively.
Besides being that guy who chugs coffee by the high-wired Big Gulp-full, I’m also that guy who prefers his coffee black, bitter and punchy enough to twist my lips like the end of a Bop-It. Yet unfortunately, Electric Unicorn is not a coffee flavor I can recommend drinking black. For me, the glory of black coffee comes from its simplicity—its earnest, unadulterated burst of smoked earth. But when you start adding all manner of weirdness to the mix, the lack of sweet and/or creamy varnish in black coffee only highlights how strange and often medicinal added flavor can be.
As a result, the black experience of Electric Unicorn is unpleasant. Since it’s trying to taste like cereal milk, the low viscosity just makes me think I’m drinking the over-watered dirt beneath a berry bush. The nuance of this fruitiness is a little too hard to tease out without any underlying sweetness, so it quickly became essential to add some lightly vanilla’d creamer.
Much better. When it’s a little bit sweeter and a lotta bit thicker, Electric Unicorn coffee starts to taste more like an authentically translated fruity cereal milk experience. Sure, the bitter oaky edge of coffee is still there as a cornerstone of flavor—as it should be—but along with a bloom of beige in this brown abyss comes two prominent fruit notes: cherry and some sort of citrus (leaning toward orange, but it’s a touch sour any way you slice it). This sort of fruity profile doesn’t remind me specifically of any one cereal, but instead it evokes a pleasing yin-yang between the popping sweetness of Fruity Pebbles and Trix’s lemon-driven cornucopia.
Ultimately, my enjoyment of Electric Unicorn is a black-and-white experience. When sipped black, this stuff highlights how no amount of forced palate intrigue can improve on something that’s straightforward and earthen. But if you’re willing to dip your toes in sugared bean waters, fruity cereal coffee becomes a fitting, full-bodied complement to any number of fruited cereals—artificial or otherwise. I will say, though, that I’m thankful the bag I have is so small. This is very much the kind of novelty coffee flavor that I can’t see myself enjoying more than a dozen or two times at most before the familiar fruity infusion begins to both bore me and settle on my tongue like some foreign film—without subtitles. Plus, no level of delicious cam quite normalize the jarring experience of drinking hot cereal milk.
In this rugged new frontier of cereal-flavored coffee beans, Bones could’ve done a lot worse. Outside of maybe Crunch Berries, I can’t really imagine any cereal profile that would translate so recognizably to this mugged medium. If you’re jonesing to mix up your morning hot jones, I recommend picking up a bag—and maybe one of Bones’ other intriguing bits of brewed experimentalism to save on shipping. Otherwise, you probably wouldn’t be far off if you just poured the remnants of your silly rabbit’s breakfast into some plain ol’ Folgers.
The Bowl: Bones Coffee – Electric Unicorn Fruity Cereal
The Breakdown: Uncannily thin and puckering when black, but a liquefied Trix–Pebbles energy booster with creamer, this one’s sure to have at least some short-term appeal for coffee and fruit cereal fans who don’t mind diluting the pure, unsweetened coffee experience.
The Bottom Line: 7 fossilized Flintstones skeletons out of 10
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