Episode Details

Coffee milk, cold milk sweetened with coffee syrup, is a fixture of Rhode Island. Its roots lie with the roughly 55,000 Italian immigrants who arrived in Providence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, bringing a habit of sweet coffee with milk. Soda fountain operators turned it into a commercial product by boiling leftover coffee grounds with milk and sugar into a shelf stable syrup. By the 1930s pharmacy lunch counters were selling coffee milk to children who wanted to drink what their parents drank.

D. Abelson and Son of Cumberland, Rhode Island, bottled the first commercial coffee syrup, Arabian brand, documented in the Ice Cream Trade Journal in 1926. Rivals followed: Silmo Packing in New Bedford in 1932, Eclipse Foods in Warwick in 1938, Coffee Time in New Hampshire, and Autocrat in Lincoln. Autocrat won by buying Eclipse and Coffee Time in the 1990s while keeping their labels on shelves. On July 29, 1993, the Rhode Island General Assembly named coffee milk the official state drink over Del's lemonade.

• Arabian brand was first advertised for ice cream toppings, milkshakes, and iced coffee.
• A coffee cabinet blends coffee ice cream, coffee syrup, and milk, a regional name with no settled origin.
• The Blackstone Valley Tourism Council sells its own coffee syrup as a heritage product.
• Dave's Coffee makes a syrup without high fructose corn syrup or artificial caramel color.
• Narragansett brewed a coffee milk stout with Autocrat in 2013, and Warwick Ice Cream made coffee milk ice cream with Autocrat in 2015.