Starbucks Caramel Macchiato

The Starbucks Caramel Macchiato costs £5.50 for a Tall and carries 214 calories in a Grande, and it is the drink most people mean when they say macchiato in the UK. Vanilla syrup goes in the cup, steamed milk over it, then the espresso is poured through the top and caramel sauce is crosshatched over the surface.

The build order is what gives it its character. Because the shots go in last and sink slowly, the drink is uneven by design: coffee forward at the top, vanilla sweet at the bottom, and neither until you stir it. The caramel on top is sauce rather than syrup, so it is thick enough to sit in lines on the foam and it dissolves into the first few mouthfuls. What you taste is closer to caramel custard than to burnt sugar.

Sugar is the number worth knowing. A Grande carries 27.6g of it out of 28.9g of carbohydrate, which is roughly seven teaspoons and just under a third of the 90g adult reference intake, before anything else you eat that day. Calories run 103 in a Short, 167 in a Tall, 214 in a Grande and 273 in a Venti. Caffeine holds at 89.1mg through Tall and Grande and reaches 133.7mg in a Venti.

The crosshatch on top is not decoration alone. Starbucks trains it as seven lines each way so the sauce is spread evenly across the foam rather than pooled in one spot, which is what stops the first mouthful being pure caramel and the last one being none. A store that drizzles it in a spiral has a barista in a hurry, and the drink tastes uneven as a result. It is a small thing and it is the difference between a good one and an average one.

Half the syrup is the most useful order change here and takes roughly 5g of sugar off a Grande without gutting the flavour, because the caramel sauce on top carries plenty on its own. It suits an afternoon rather than a first coffee, and it works better in a glass where the layers show. The Latte Macchiato is this drink stripped back to milk and espresso, and the Caffè Latte is where to go for the same shape at 151 calories.