Starbucks Pink Coconut Starbucks Refresha

The Starbucks Pink Coconut Refresha costs £5.80 for a Tall and carries 121 calories in a Grande, which makes it the heaviest of the four Refresha drinks. The strawberry and acai base is built with coconut drink rather than water, and that swap is the whole difference.

Coconut turns a sharp drink into a soft one. Fat carries flavour differently from water: it coats the mouth, slows the sweetness down and rounds off the tart edge the plain Strawberry Acai has. The colour changes too, from a clear red to the opaque pink the drink is named for. What it tastes like is closer to a strawberry milkshake than to an iced tea, with the acai reduced to a faint depth underneath.

The coconut is why the numbers move. A Grande carries 2.1g of fat and 2.3g of protein where the plain version has almost none of either, and calories go from 79 to 121. Sugar is 22.3g out of 22.6g of carbohydrate. Caffeine is 4.9mg in a Grande, the same as the plain version, since the green coffee extract is unchanged.

Coconut also changes how long the drink holds up. Fat suspends the flavour compounds rather than letting them dilute straight into the melt, so a Pink Coconut left standing tastes weaker but still recognisable where a water based Refresha turns to faintly sweet water. That makes it the better choice of the four if the drink has to survive a journey.

It is dairy free as built, which makes it one of the few sweet cold drinks on the menu a vegan can order without a substitution. Sizes run 94 calories in a Tall, 121 in a Grande and 148 in a Venti. The Strawberry Acai Refresha is the lighter, sharper original, and the Cool Lime Refresha is the lightest of the range.