Did I need 750 words on the PSL? Yes, yes I did, especially with writing like this.
But Starbucks research-and-development personnel working in a 21st-century “Liquid Lab” embellished this idea by means of a subtraction: They got rid of the pie. The spice mix was disembodied and dissolved into a drink, then spiked with color to give the drink its orange, pie-adjacent hue. The presence of a crust, and of a gelatinized interior, had always been unnecessary, Starbucks casually decided. Pumpkin pie was just a medium to deliver the spice mix that constitutes autumn’s true, gastronomical signature. It makes sense, really. Do you really want to eat the pumpkin? You do not, yet you cannot simply ingest the spice on its own.
The Spice must flow.