Starbucks Peach Iced Tea 330ml

Peach Iced Tea 330ml costs £2.95 at Starbucks UK and carries 69 calories with 16g of sugar. It is a pasteurised juice drink built on white grape and peach juices with black tea extract and natural flavourings.

The ingredient order tells you what this actually is. Grape juice comes first, peach second and tea third as an extract rather than a brew, so the drink is closer to a fruit juice with tea in it than to tea with fruit added. That is why it tastes rounder and less astringent than a home brewed iced tea, which leads with tannin and finishes dry.

Caffeine is the question people ask and the honest answer is that no figure is published for this bottle. A tea extract at this dilution carries some, almost certainly well under a shop brewed iced tea and far under any coffee, but the label does not quantify it. Anyone counting caffeine precisely should treat it as a small unknown rather than as zero.

16g of sugar puts it above the Berries Juice Drink at 15g in a smaller bottle and well below the Apple and Mango Juice at 28g. It carries a trace of salt at 0.03g, the highest of the bottled drinks, which is still negligible in practice.

Bottled iced tea and brewed iced tea are far enough apart that the name does both a disservice. A tea brewed and chilled in store is astringent and dry and tastes of tea; this is soft, sweet and tastes of fruit. Neither is trying to be the other, and expecting the first from a bottle of the second is where the disappointment usually comes from.

No dietary labels are published for this one, so anyone eating vegan or avoiding gluten should read the bottle in store rather than assume. Prices run to £3.80 on the delivery platforms. The Still Lemonade is the low sugar cold option at 0.7g.