Starbucks Emperor's Clouds & Mist Tea

Starbucks Emperor's Clouds and Mist Tea costs £3.15 for a Tall and carries 4 calories in a Grande. It is a single origin green tea rather than a blend, grown on the mist covered slopes of Lu Shan in Jiangxi, which is where the name comes from.

Single origin matters more in green tea than in black. There is no blending to even out a bad harvest, so the cup carries the character of one place: light, toasty and faintly sweet, with none of the grassy sharpness that a cheaper green tea has. The leaves are pan fired rather than steamed, which is a Chinese method rather than a Japanese one and gives that toasted note. Brewed correctly the liquor is pale gold rather than green.

Water temperature is the whole game with this one. Green tea leaves scorch above about 80C and the cup turns bitter and dull within seconds, which is the single most common way it gets ruined. Starbucks pours at a set temperature and hands over the cup with the bag still in it, so how long it stays there is the drinker's decision. Two to three minutes is right, and beyond four it is finished.

Good green tea also gives you more than one cup out of the same leaf, which is a habit almost nobody brings into a coffee shop. The second brew from a Chinese green is often the better one: the first pass takes the sharpest compounds and the second comes out rounder and sweeter. That is impossible with the bag Starbucks hands over, but it is the main argument for buying loose leaf and doing this at home instead.

Calories are 4 in a Short, Tall and Grande, and 7 in a Venti. No sugar, no carbohydrate. The caffeine figure Starbucks UK publishes, 0.9mg for a Grande, is well below what a brewed green tea would normally hold, so it is repeated here as their published number rather than as the real content of the cup. The Matcha Latte is the other green tea on the menu and works completely differently, and the Mint Herbal Blend is the caffeine free option.