Starbucks Strawberry Matcha Cloud Frappuccino

The Starbucks Strawberry Matcha Cloud Frappuccino costs £6.90 for a Tall and carries 334 calories in a Grande. Matcha, vanilla syrup, milk and ice are blended and layered with a strawberry flavour cream cold foam.

Matcha replaces the Frappuccino Roast here, and that changes the caffeine more than the flavour. A Grande carries 61.9mg against 27.7mg for the brown sugar cloud, which makes this the strongest Frappuccino on the menu by a clear margin. Green tea and strawberry work together for the same reason strawberry and rhubarb do: the tea brings a vegetal, faintly bitter edge that stops the fruit reading as jam. Vanilla in the blend bridges the two.

Visually it is the most striking drink Starbucks UK sells, with pink foam sinking through pale green in bands. Sugar is 37.7g in a Grande out of 39.3g of carbohydrate, and fat is 16.9g with 10.6g saturated. Calories run 265 in a Tall, 334 in a Grande and 369 in a Venti, which puts it between the brown sugar and caramel mocha versions.

Matcha in a blended drink is a harder thing to get right than matcha in a latte. Ice dulls flavour, so a blend needs more powder than a hot drink to taste of anything, and more powder means more of the bitterness that milk usually hides. The vanilla syrup is there to cover that gap rather than for its own sake, which is why an unsweetened version of this drink does not really exist.

Caffeine is worth watching if the drink is going to a child, since 61.9mg in a Grande is closer to a coffee than the other Frappuccinos are, and the colour makes it a common request. Half the vanilla syrup takes off around 8g of sugar without touching the matcha. The Matcha Latte is the plain hot version at 161 calories, and the Brown Sugar Cloud Frappuccino is the coffee based drink in the same range.