Got coffee milk? We do in R.I.

If you’re not a native, however, there’s a good chance you’ve never tried coffee milk – and you might even think it’s an odd choice for the official state drink, as designated by the state legislature in 1993.

That’s always been the problem for Autocrat, the Lincoln coffee and syrup maker: How do you convince the rest of the world that cold coffee isn’t a bad thing?

“We sell the equivalent of 20 million servings of coffee syrup a year in the greater Rhode Island area, in a population of 1.5 million,” said Richard M. Field Jr., the fourth-generation president of Autocrat. “Imagine what you can do with a population of more than 260 million in the United States and the rest of the world. But the question has always been ‘How do you get beyond the traditional greater Rhode Island market?’”