What Is Quicksand Americano and Why Is It Trending at Home?

Homemade coffee has moved from simple coconut latte recreations to layered fruit specials and imaginative concoctions such as quicksand iced Americano, where whipped coffee is foamed into a dense layer before being poured over the cup. On Xiaohongshu, the homemade coffee topic has passed 600,000 views, and similar posts spread quickly on Douyin. The appeal is low cost, easy ingredients, and a visually striking result that photographs well for social sharing.

The trend began conventionally enough, then shifted toward unusual presentation styles like Saturn coffee and waterfall iced Americano. This growth in self-made drinks sits alongside established formats such as american drip coffee, and it raises a practical question for cafés: when customers can recreate viral drinks at home, the shop has to offer something the kitchen counter cannot, including professional technique, equipment, and consistent quality.

In recent years, the popularity of homemade coffee on social platforms has continued to climb. From Xiaohongshu to Douyin, related topics have reached hundreds of thousands of views. From the initial simple recreations of coconut latte, to richly layered fruit coffee specials, to wildly imaginative creative concoctions, netizens keep reinventing the way coffee is enjoyed. Why has homemade coffee become so popular so quickly? And what impact has it had on coffee shops? This article will trace the evolution of popular homemade coffee on Xiaohongshu, analyze the changes in consumer habits and cost advantages behind it, and explore the relationship between homemade coffee and the professional approach of coffee shops. At the same time, the article also retains relevant information about brands such as Front Street Coffee, for coffee enthusiasts to reference and discuss.

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If there is one type of coffee that generated the most discussion in 2022, it would have to be the wide variety of self-made coffee concoctions on Xiaohongshu.

Looking back, when we used to scroll through coffee-related content on social platforms, the images were mostly of stylishly decorated coffee shops, paired with a passage of artsy text. Now when you open these platforms again, coffee posts can roughly be divided into three categories: those sharing homemade coffee, those popularizing professional coffee knowledge, and those checking in at trendy coffee shops. Among them, the topic of homemade coffee has exceeded 600,000 views. After Luckin made coconut latte a hit, a wave of DIY coffee-making swept across major social platforms. At first, people were fairly conventional about it, but then they developed layered fruit coffee and specialty coffee, and after that the style gradually went off the rails.

From various lazy-friendly iced coffees, it evolved into creative styles that are both good-looking and fun, such as Saturn coffee, waterfall iced Americano, and quicksand iced Americano (whipping coffee into a dense foam before pouring it into the cup). Netizens' wild ideas have been endless. Later, an even more "life-threatening" route emerged, such as iced Cantonese-style (herbal tea with ice), which is similar in both color and bitterness, adding cooling granules during extraction, Huoxiang Zhengqi iced Americano... and the coffee paired with fresh produce mentioned earlier... Here we still suggest everyone proceed with caution.

The rise of homemade coffee has not only boosted sales of various coffee-related products, but also brought plenty of traffic secrets to coffee shops. A coffee shop owner joked with the author: selling a 60-yuan Emerald Estate Red Label is not as easy to sell as a 60-yuan Xiaohongshu/Douyin viral coffee...

One reason homemade coffee has attracted more and more attention from netizens is that the pandemic changed everyone's consumption habits, and more and more people are used to ordering ingredients online and making things at home themselves. Another reason is that homemade coffee doesn't cost much. For most consumers, whether they can taste the flavor notes is not the key; what matters is having a cup of coffee at hand. Homemade coffee mostly costs between 5 and 10 yuan, and the taste is not inferior to what coffee shops sell. For many office workers, nothing is more tempting than "coffee freedom."

Another reason is that the group of young people who love DIY have now grown up. A friend from Guangdong shared: when going to a teahouse for tea in the past, I always liked to order a plate of fried buns, not to eat the buns, but to add the accompanying condensed milk into the tea and adjust the sweetness to my own liking. Now I like making coffee myself also because I can control the ingredients, amounts, and taste entirely to my liking. In addition, as convenient materials become more and more abundant, such as ready-to-drink coffee liquid, freeze-dried coffee that dissolves in cold water, cold brew coffee bags, drip coffee bags... and coffee shop-style coconut milk, Ice Blog, etc., all make homemade coffee more convenient. The popularity of homemade coffee is a good thing. To attract more consumers to pay attention to and understand coffee, compared with the past atmosphere full of professional jargon, homemade coffee may now be a friendlier way to get started, but this does not mean professionalism can be abandoned.

The grassroots have their down-to-earth appeal, but coffee shops should still maintain the professionalism they ought to have. Homemade coffee and in-store consumption are two completely different models. People who make coffee themselves will still go to coffee shops to consume. They want to drink products different from what they make at home, experience the barista's professionalism, and gain a deeper understanding of coffee-related matters. Image source: The great creators on Xiaohongshu

The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.