Are americanos bitter when beetroot is added?

At the start of 2025, Mstand launched a Beet Apple Hot Americano and a Beet Latte alongside a red teddy fleece tote bag. Reviews split sharply. Some found apple sweetness and beet aroma working with the coffee; more said it tasted like cough syrup or fructose, with earthy beet notes hard to blend. Americanos here read sweet-and-sour rather than bitter.

Mstand described the drinks as balanced sweet and sour with vegetable and fruit flavors. Loyal customers were disappointed, saying the brand's focus has moved from specialty coffee toward merchandise marketing. The case shows that vegetable-and-fruit coffee innovation has to balance flavor integration with mass acceptance, since novelty alone does not guarantee a repeat order.

At the start of 2025, Mstand continued its merchandise marketing strategy, launching a red teddy fleece tote bag to entice consumers to order their first coffee of the new year, while also releasing two vegetable-and-fruit-concept drinks: Beet Apple Hot Americano and Beet Latte. The official description claims the drinks have a balanced sweet-and-sour taste with beet vegetable-and-fruit flavors, but consumer reviews are sharply divided: some find the combination of apple's crisp sweetness and beet's aroma with rich coffee impressive, while more people bluntly say it tastes like cough syrup or fructose flavoring, with the beet's earthy notes hard to blend with coffee. In addition, loyal users expressed disappointment with the brand's new product development direction, believing its focus has shifted from specialty coffee to merchandise marketing. Front Street Coffee reminds that vegetable-and-fruit coffee innovation needs to balance flavor integration with mass acceptance.

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At the very start of 2025, major coffee chains rolled out various activities leveraging the New Year holiday atmosphere to attract customers to order their first drink of the new year.

Mstand, known as the "luggage factory of the coffee world," naturally continued its forte in merchandise marketing to draw fans' attention. At the beginning of the new year, the brand launched a simple and practical teddy fleece single-shoulder tote bag; its striking bright red color and auspicious good fortune sparked curiosity among many consumers, who rushed to order their first coffee of 2025 from Mstand.

Beyond merchandise, Mstand also simultaneously launched two new products, Beet Apple Hot Americano and Beet Latte, aiming to add some "good fortune" to fans' lives in the new year. However, in the eyes of fans, combining earthy beet with rich coffee "sounds like dark cuisine."

But for consumers seeking novelty, seeing Mstand put this unimaginable combination of beet and coffee on the table prompted jokes that the brand was following in the footsteps of tea shops and preparing to enter the fruit-and-vegetable arena.

Jokes aside, they still placed orders one after another, wanting to try what this vegetable coffee actually tasted like. According to the official introduction, whether Americano or Latte, you can taste beet vegetable-and-fruit flavors, with an overall balanced sweet-and-sour profile.

However, tasters had differing views on Mstand's new year drinks. Those who prefer sweetness found the two new products quite unique; as the official promotion said, you can taste the crisp sweetness of apple and the aroma of beet, paired with rich coffee, making it overall not hard to accept and quite impressive.

But in the eyes of another group, the combination of beet and coffee is too far ahead of its time, and they bluntly say they cannot accept this strange taste: "A bit complex. A bit sweet, a bit sour, a bit bitter, a bit fragrant, a bit weird," "What's the difference between this and buying Luckin's sweet water?", "It has a fructose flavoring taste," "It's just apple flavor plus a bitter taste, an unintegrated feeling, each going its own way."

Many people reported that Mstand's new products are overall too sweet, tasting "just like cough syrup," and those who don't like sweetness may find them hard to swallow. Some also compared them with other brands' apple Americanos, believing Mstand's new products fall slightly short in taste.

Besides being unsatisfied with the new products' flavors, loyal users were also somewhat disappointed with Mstand's beverage development. In the impression of some regulars, the brand usually launches a holiday-atmosphere mulled wine Americano during Christmas, but unexpectedly, the brand did not bring back that memorable limited-edition drink briefly, instead launching a "vegetable coffee" that doesn't quite cater to mass tastes.

"Can product development try it themselves before launching new products?", "It feels like launching new products for the sake of launching new products. After drinking it twice, I want to ask them for a refund on the spot," "Waited forever for a new product, so I thought I'd try it out of curiosity... sure enough, I stepped on a landmine."

Over the past year, Mstand has not stopped developing new products, but longtime fans bluntly say that very few drinks are eye-catching, and the public's impression of the brand is more about the various merchandise it launches every so often. They say that perhaps before long, when consumers mention Mstand, the byword will no longer be "one of the representatives of specialty coffee," but rather "a merchandise store that sells coffee."

Image source: Xiaohongshu

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