Starbucks White Chocolate Mocha

The Starbucks White Chocolate Mocha costs £6.05 for a Tall and carries 345 calories in a Grande with 45.4g of sugar, which makes it the sweetest hot drink on the Starbucks UK menu. White chocolate sauce, espresso and steamed milk go in, and whipped cream tops it.

White chocolate has no cocoa solids in it, only cocoa butter, so there is no bitterness anywhere in this drink to push back against the sugar. That is why it tastes so different from a standard mocha despite the same build. The flavour is closer to warm condensed milk with a coffee edge, and the texture is noticeably heavier because the sauce carries more fat than the dark version. The espresso is the only thing stopping it reading as pudding.

The numbers back that up. 45.4g of sugar in a Grande is half an adult's 90g reference intake in one cup, and 46.2g of carbohydrate means almost all of it is sugar. Saturated fat is 10.5g out of 12.7g total. Calories run 181 in a Short, 265 in a Tall, 345 in a Grande and 417 in a Venti, which is the highest of any hot drink on the menu. Caffeine sits at the usual 89.1mg through Tall and Grande.

Iced, the balance shifts considerably. Cold milk carries less of the sauce in suspension and the sweetness reads lower even though the sugar figure barely moves, which is why people who find the hot version too much often get on with the iced one. The trade is that the sauce tends to settle at the bottom of the cup, so it wants a stir before the first sip rather than after the last.

Two changes bring it into range: no whipped cream saves about 70 calories, and half the sauce takes off roughly a third of the sugar. Ordered as a Short it lands at 181 calories, which is a fair place to start. The Caffè Mocha is the darker, less sweet version, and the Classic Hot Chocolate drops the coffee if the espresso is not what you came for.