Starbucks Iced White Chocolate Mocha

The Starbucks Iced White Chocolate Mocha costs £6.10 for a Tall and carries 401 calories in a Grande with 45.7g of sugar, which makes it the heaviest cold drink on the Starbucks UK menu. Espresso, white chocolate sauce and cold milk go over ice under whipped cream.

White chocolate has cocoa butter but no cocoa solids, so there is no bitterness anywhere in the drink to balance the sugar. Cold helps more than it does in the hot version, because chilling mutes sweetness slightly and the espresso keeps some presence in the middle of the cup. What it tastes like is closer to iced condensed milk with a coffee edge than to chocolate. The texture is heavier than any other iced drink on the menu.

The figures are worth reading before ordering. 45.7g of sugar in a Grande is more than half the 90g adult reference intake, and 46.5g of carbohydrate means essentially all of it is sugar. Saturated fat is 14.9g out of 19.1g total, which is close to three quarters of the daily 20g. Calories run 288 in a Tall, 401 in a Grande and 438 in a Venti, the highest of any cold drink on the menu.

Its weight is what separates it from everything else on the cold menu. Cocoa butter melts at close to body temperature, so a white chocolate sauce coats the mouth in a way a dark chocolate one does not, and over ice that coating lingers rather than clearing. The effect is closer to drinking a milkshake than a coffee, and it is the reason a Tall of this satisfies where a Tall of most iced drinks does not.

Three changes bring it into range: no whipped cream saves about 110 calories, half the sauce takes roughly a third off the sugar, and a Tall at 288 is a reasonable place to land. Caffeine sits at 89.1mg through Tall and Grande and 133.7mg in a Venti. The Iced Caffè Mocha is the darker, less sweet version, and the White Chocolate Mocha is the hot original at 345 calories.