Starbucks Iced Green Tea

Starbucks Iced Green Tea carries 0 calories in every size, which makes it the only item on the whole Starbucks UK menu with a published count of zero. Green tea is brewed, chilled and poured over ice, and nothing else goes in unless you ask for it.

Brewed and chilled tea tastes cleaner than a hot cup of the same leaf. Cold suppresses the astringency that green tea develops as it cools in a mug, so what reaches you is the toasted, faintly sweet side of the leaf without the drying finish. It is thin in the mouth by design. Anyone expecting the body of a matcha will find it sparse, because this is an infusion rather than the whole leaf in suspension.

Zero calories, zero sugar and zero carbohydrate across Tall, Grande and Venti is the reason to order it. Caffeine is negligible on the published figures at 0.6mg in a Tall, 1mg in a Grande and 1.1mg in a Venti, and those numbers sit far below what brewed green tea would normally deliver, so they are reported here as published rather than as the real content of the cup. Starbucks UK does not list a delivery price for it, so the figure above is blank rather than invented.

The zero is worth putting in context, because it is genuinely unusual. Every other drink on the cold menu carries something: a Cool Lime Refresha is 69 calories, a plain iced americano 11, even black filter coffee 31. An infusion with the leaf strained out leaves nothing behind that the body counts, which is what makes this the one order on the board with no nutritional consequence at all.

Syrup is where the zero disappears. A single pump of classic syrup adds roughly 20 calories and 5g of sugar, and stores add it by default in some markets, so it is worth saying unsweetened at the till. The Peach Iced Tea is the sweetened version at 72 calories in a Grande, and Emperor's Clouds and Mist is the hot green tea on the menu.