Tokyo: Starbucks Coffee Jelly Frappuccino

In Tokyo, everybody is drinking the Coffee Jelly Frappuccino from Starbucks right now. It’s a seasonal drink, only available from July 2^nd to August 31^st, and it has become so popular, it might turn out to be the Japanese equivalent to Pumpkin Spice Latte. 

I first learned about the Coffee Jelly Frappuccino on Ryoko’s blog. I’m not a big coffee drinker, but I like Starbucks (with a few exceptions), and the Coffee Jelly Frappuccino definitely looked like my cup of tea coffee. On my way back to the hotel yesterday, I therefore stopped by Starbucks at Akihabara Station to check it out.

By the way, shouldn’t we just call it CJ Frap? Coffee Jelly Frappuccino takes forever to write, and there’s always a risk that you forget a “p” or a “c” along the way. Besides, the Starbucks staff, who made my coffee, wrote CJ on my cup, so I suspect that’s also what they’re calling it.

The CJ Frap has four layers: Coffee jelly, vanilla cream, ice-blended coffee and whipped cream.Though, as you can see in my photos, the layers merge into each other, so the drink doesn’t look as pretty in real life as it does in the Starbucks photo, which are cashing in likes all over social media these days. I usually don’t like jelly desserts, but somehow, the coffee jelly in the CJ Frap makes sense. It’s almost like a coffee version of bubble tea, and it even comes with an extra-wide straw, so you can suck up the big chunks of jelly, which of course is softer than the tapioca pearls used for boba.

The CJ Frap is not as sweet as one could fear, and if you mix the different layers well before drinking, it actually tastes like coffee. However, there’s no doubt, it still feels more like a dessert, than a real cup of coffee, and I’m quite sure that my coffee snob husband wouldn’t like it at all. Though for the coffee-curious ones like me, the Coffee Jelly Frappuccino is easy to love, and I hope that Starbucks will consider launching it in Dubai too.