8 Discontinued Starbucks Fall Drinks We Wish Would Make A Comeback

While we know there's no room on the Starbucks menu for every drink it has ever made, we do wish a few of its discontinued fall drinks would make a comeback. There are plenty of seasonal Starbucks items that have been taken off the menu, but the autumnal drinks hit harder for those who aren't stuck on pumpkin spice lattes all season. Once the year's fall lineup gets announced and you don't see your favorite, it can be disappointing. Besides being pumpkin spice season, autumn is the season for caramel, butterscotch, maple, apples, pecans, and all things spooky for Halloween. We put on our cozy sweaters and boots and traipse down to our local coffee shop with visions of all of these flavors in our heads, hoping for the best. However, there are always some that don't make the cut every year, but to our disappointment.

If we wish hard enough and loudly enough on social media, sometimes our favorite drinks do return. For example, we were going to add Apple Crisp drinks to this list, but everyone was so sad they didn't come back that Starbucks announced they'd be coming back after all. So, if you have a favorite autumn drink you're missing, it's entirely possible to bring them back with a team effort from fans. Here are eight of the fall Starbucks drinks we'd like to see back on the fall Starbucks menu, and perhaps they will make a return one day if enough people get behind them.

With Halloween right around the corner and always in our hearts, the first discontinued fall drink we'd like to see make a comeback is the Witch's Brew Frappuccino. As far as we can tell, it only ever made an appearance on the menu in 2018 as a limited-time drink for spooky season. The drink itself was purple, and the whipped cream on top was covered in a sprinkling of green. So, you couldn't help but think of witches and other supervillains that tend to be associated with such colors.

The colors didn't necessarily match the flavors, though. After all, a grape and sour apple Frappuccino probably wouldn't have gone over very well. Instead, it was supposed to taste exactly like you'd imagine a witch's brew might: like orange crème. Well, okay, that's probably not what you were expecting, but we'll take an orange crème Frappuccino in any color we can get it. Granted, some people reported that it tasted more like the milk from Fruity Pebbles cereal. The fun part of this drink was that it had witch's brew vibes with swirls of chia seeds throughout, which gave it an occasional slimy texture. If you've had chia pudding, then you know that that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it did add to the feeling that you were getting a drink straight from a witch's caldron. Overall, we just want to see this comeback because it was a fun concept and a pretty drink.

Speaking of Starbucks Halloween Frappuccino drinks with fun concepts, we really need the Zombie Frappuccino to make a comeback, probably more than any other autumnal Starbucks drink. The Zombie Frappuccino came out in 2017 as a limited-time-only drink, and it featured brains. How cool is that? There was a pink whipped cream brain on top that looked like it was trickling red blood down into the zombie skin-colored green layer below. Gosh, that was a genius layering choice for a zombie-themed drink. It was practically a work of art.

The flavors for the Zombie Frappuccino were tart apple and caramel, which likely helped inspire all the apple-flavored fall drinks that started coming out in 2021. It was proof that the apple concept could work even if it sounded dubious at first. But all the apple drinks we have now are far too tame when what we really want are apples and brains, so we can walk into work or sit in the school pickup line with a drink that looks like it's one part horror movie and one part mad scientist. We need a little whimsy with our apples and something that says "Halloween" in neon colors.

Lest you think we're only interested in creepy Halloween Starbucks drinks for fall, we have a few serious ones on our list, too. The Chile Mocha one is just such a drink. It came out in the 2016 fall lineup but never made a comeback in future years. We want to think it might do better if it came back now, with more people who are tired of pumpkin spice wanting to branch out to try different autumn drinks.

Chocolate drinks in Mesoamerica have long included chile peppers, all the way back to the time of the Mayans and Aztecs. Just like the ancients did, we think these two flavors belong together. The addition of chile to mocha gives you the heat of chile peppers combined with the bitterness of coffee and chocolate, the creaminess of the milk, and the sweetness of the sugar, which is a complex combination destined to make discerning mouths happy.

Starbucks' Chile Mocha was certainly complex. The cocoa for this mocha was infused with cayenne and ancho chile peppers. It also had a delightful whipped cream topping sprinkled with a sugar-sweetened combination of the same chile peppers in the cocoa, along with paprika, cinnamon, and a smidge of salt. It's one of those drinks with a flavor mix that makes perfect sense once you've tried it. It would be the perfect drink to bring back for Día de los Muertos.

Another limited-time fall drink we miss is the Teavana Oprah Cinnamon Chai Tea Latte. Yes, it was named after Oprah Winfrey, who helped create the tea blend with Naoko Tsundoda from Teavana. This drink first came out in the spring of 2014, a couple of years after Starbucks bought Teavana. Then, it returned in the fall of 2015, likely because chai spices fit well with other spicy autumnal drinks. You could also get a canister of Oprah Chai Tea from Teavana or Starbucks to make at home as recently as the winter of 2020, but we haven't seen it on the fall menu at Starbucks again as a latte.

Sure, you can get a chai latte from Starbucks any time you want, but we like the idea of being able to switch up our chai experience every now and then. Oprah's version married black tea with rooibos, which starts the chai out with a different flavor direction than ordinary chai. Then, it added a mix of cinnamon and cloves, with some of our favorite chai spices: cardamom and ginger.

Something else that made this chai special was that proceeds from the sale of the drink went into the coffers of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Foundation. So, you not only got a tasty chai drink, but you also became a part of providing young people with a chance for educational opportunities they wouldn't otherwise have.

While there's a Pecan Crunch Oatmilk Latte as part of the 2025 fall lineup, the drink we were hoping to make a comeback was the Maple Pecan Latte. This was another drink that made its debut in a completely different decade without a return.

When the maple pecan latte showed up in the fall drink lineup in 2017, it looked like a sure-fire winner. After all, you enjoy maple syrup and pecans atop waffles and pancakes in the cooler months, so why not try the flavor combo in your latte? While it offered the nuttiness of maple and a kiss of maple syrup and even a bit of smokiness, it was missing the whipped cream you'd get on pecan waffles. However, an intriguing dusting of yellow, brown, and orange sugar sprinkles perhaps partially made up for the lack of whipped cream topping. Not only did the sprinkles match the color of fall leaves, but the colors were natural, coming from foods like carrots and apples, and even from hibiscus flowers.

This drink may have done a little better if it had come out later in autumn, when the weather had cooled off and maple is a little more cozy. We also like the idea of combining the pecan crunch concept from the 2025 drink with the maple concept from the 2017 drink. Either way, it's one we wish would come back in some form or another.

If you're more of a butterscotch than a caramel person, you're likely missing the Starbucks Smoked Butterscotch Latte, which first came out in 2016. While we remember it not being as smoky or butterscotch-y as we had anticipated, it's still a discontinued drink we miss simply because its flavor was subtle and not overwhelming.

Some people have found a way to still get the butterscotch latte from the secret menu. Basically, you'll want to ask for equal pumps of caramel syrup and toffee nut. Granted, toffee nut syrup may not always be available.

Starbucks also sells smoked butterscotch flavored coffee grounds and K-Cups from August to October. It sounds as if all the butterscotch and smoky notes may be even more pronounced in the coffee version, which may be why the company decided to bring back the grounds every year rather than the latte. Still, we'd like the option to not have to make the latte at home or resort to alternative syrups to try to get something approaching the drink we once enjoyed.

Yet another Halloween drink we'd like to see come back this fall is the Frappula Frappuccino. Part of the reason was that it was pretty, and the other part is that it was a white chocolate and raspberry mocha flavored drink. The drink first came out in 2015 and made a comeback in 2016. However, we haven't seen it on the official menu since then.

Like the zombie drink, the Frappula drink is made to look like it has blood dripping down the cup, with a white Frappuccino layer below. Creative baristas sometimes would add two bloody fang marks at the top of the drink to make it look as if Dracula himself had bitten into blood-infused whipped cream.

As long as the ingredients are available, you should still be able to order this drink with a little instruction and a picture to help your barista envision what you want. Basically, they'll put whipped cream and mocha sauce at the bottom, adding a white chocolate Frappuccino middle layer, and drizzling the Frappuccino layer with raspberry syrup before adding whipped cream. If there's no white chocolate Frappuccino, you could go with a different white one, like vanilla bean crème, which we think might be even better. Although it would be far easier if they'd just add it back to the menu, so you didn't have to give detailed instructions to your barista and hope for the best.

The final drink on our list of Starbucks fall drinks we'd like to see make a comeback is the dark barrel latte, which barely made it in the door at all. If you don't remember this drink, there's a good reason; Starbucks didn't release the dark barrel latte everywhere.

The idea behind this drink was to mix the flavor of dark stout beer with coffee. It sounds like a match made in heaven to us. While there was no actual beer in the drink, those who tasted it found that it tasted very similar to a stout beer like Guinness. The drink used a stout-flavored chocolate sauce for flavoring. It also came with whipped cream on top as well as a drizzle of dark caramel syrup, landing it firmly in latte territory.

The company only tested the drink in Ohio and Florida in the fall of 2014, but then it disappeared. We're left wondering why it never made it to other states. Perhaps the world wasn't ready for it then, but we are now. With so many people switching over to non-alcoholic beers in the past few years, we think there'd be plenty of people flocking to try this latte. We have faith that, if the flavor wasn't quite right in 2014, perhaps the company might have the motivation to keep experimenting to get it right for a world that's now ready for it.