I manage a fair-trade / organic coffee shop, and part of the job is making sure that every drink that goes to a customer is the best drink possible. With our quality espresso and trained baristas, that usually isn’t a problem. One thing that I (as well as several of the baristas I work with) am not happy with is our soy drinks. We currently use Silk Vanilla. It has an ok taste, but it doesn’t foam well – and who wants just a cup of hot soy milk with espresso added? The texture of the milk is a main part of espresso drinks, and its something that I would like to see improved with our soy drinks.

Because of this, we decided to try out some other soy milks. I went to 2 local natural food stores, and bought a variety of soy milk products. The only requirement when selecting them was that it had to be organic (our current, Silk Vanilla, is “natural”, not “organic”, which they changed somewhat recently).

We had 6 people rating the drinks. We rated them all on a 1 (bad) to 5 (amazing) scale, both in taste and in foaminess. The results were not too surprising, there are definitely some better soy milks out there for foaminess, and some worse soy milks out there for taste. We did find one that we all agreed was best on both ratings, and we are hopefully going to be able to switch to it in the near future.