Starbucks Cool Lime Starbucks Refresha Drink

The Starbucks Cool Lime Refresha costs £5.80 for a Tall and carries 69 calories in a Grande, which makes it the lightest of the four Refresha drinks. Lime and citrus flavours are shaken with ice and dried lime slices, and green coffee extract is the base.

Green coffee extract is what separates a Refresha from a squash. Unroasted coffee beans carry caffeine but almost none of the flavour roasting creates, so the extract adds a mild lift and a faint tea like dryness without tasting of coffee at all. Lime sits over the top of it, sharp and slightly bitter from the peel in the dried slices, which soften and release more of themselves the longer the drink sits.

Caffeine is 7.4mg in a Tall, 9.8mg in a Grande and 12.4mg in a Venti, which is roughly a tenth of a Grande Caffè Latte and low enough to make it a reasonable evening order. Sugar is 15.6g in a Grande out of 16.1g of carbohydrate. Calories run 53, 69 and 86 across the three sizes.

It sits at the light end of the whole cold menu, which is easy to miss behind the sweetness. A Grande here is 69 calories against 342 for a Grande iced mocha, and it carries no fat and no protein worth counting. Anyone looking for something cold, sweet and under a hundred calories has very few other options on the board.

The dried lime slices are not a garnish and they are meant to be left in. They keep releasing citrus oil as they rehydrate, so the last third of the glass tastes sharper than the first, which is the opposite of how most sweet cold drinks behave. The Strawberry Acai Refresha is the sweeter fruit option, and the Iced Green Tea is where to go for no sugar at all.