Starbucks Medicine Ball Tea Recipe

Starbucks' Medicine Ball — Honey Citrus Mint Tea on the menu — is one bag each of Teavana Jade Citrus Mint and Peach Tranquility steeped in a cup of hot water, topped up with a cup of steamed lemonade and a spoon of honey. It takes five minutes and makes one 16-ounce grande. Starbucks lists a grande at 130 calories and 30 grams of sugar, nearly all from the lemonade and honey.

What Starbucks puts in a Medicine Ball

The drink began as an off-menu order. Customers asked for the two teas together, with lemonade instead of water and honey on top, often enough that Starbucks put it on the menu in 2017 under the name Honey Citrus Mint Tea. The nickname stuck because people ordered it when they had a cold — but it is a hot, sweet, minty tea, and this page makes no other claim for it. What it does is exactly what the name says: honey, citrus, mint, and warmth.

The official version is half hot water and half steamed lemonade, one Jade Citrus Mint sachet — a green tea with spearmint, lemon verbena and lemongrass — and one Peach Tranquility sachet, a caffeine-free blend of peach, chamomile, candied pineapple and rose hips. The barista adds honey from a pump. That is the whole drink; there is no syrup and no secret ingredient.

This recipe is a reconstruction. MakeFoodLovely is not connected with Starbucks, and the drink in the cup is the one described above, not a copy of a recipe Starbucks has published.

How to make it at home

The order of operations is what makes the home version taste like the shop's. The tea bags steep in plain hot water, not in the lemonade: the acid in lemonade extracts less from the leaves, and boiling lemonade makes it taste cooked. The lemonade goes in afterwards, warmed only until it steams. And the honey dissolves in the hot tea before the lemonade cools it down; stirred in at the end, a spoon of honey sits at the bottom of the mug.

Two other points:

• The ratio is one to one, a cup of water to a cup of lemonade, which gives the 16 ounces of a grande. For a venti, use a cup and a half of each and two tea bags of each kind.
• Any lemonade works, but the shop uses a plain, fairly sweet one. A tart, fresh-squeezed lemonade wants an extra teaspoon of honey.

Ingredients

• 1 cup water
• 1 Teavana Jade Citrus Mint tea bag
• 1 Teavana Peach Tranquility tea bag
• 1 cup lemonade
• 1 tablespoon honey
• 1 lemon slice
• 2 fresh mint leaves (optional)

Instructions

1. Bring the water to a boil, pour it into a 16-ounce mug and add both tea bags. Steep for 3 minutes.
2. Meanwhile warm the lemonade in a small saucepan or the microwave until steaming but not boiling, about 1 minute.
3. Lift out the tea bags, pressing them against the side of the mug. Stir in the honey until it dissolves.
4. Pour in the warm lemonade, add the lemon slice and the mint leaves, and drink hot.

Getting the two teas

Both blends are sold in boxes of tea bags under the Teavana name — in Starbucks stores and in most large supermarkets, usually near the other tea. One box of each makes about fifteen drinks.

If only one is to hand, Jade Citrus Mint is the one that matters; it carries the mint and the lemon that define the drink. Peach Tranquility adds the soft, sweet background. Without the Teavana blends, the nearest match is a green tea with mint — a green-and-spearmint blend, or a green tea bag plus a few fresh mint leaves — together with any peach or peach-chamomile herbal tea.

Iced version

Steep both bags in half a cup of boiling water for 5 minutes so the tea is double strength, stir in the honey while it is hot, then fill a tall glass with ice, add the tea and top it up with cold lemonade. A brewed tea poured over ice at normal strength tastes watery once the ice melts; the double steep is what keeps it tasting like the hot one.

It sits comfortably beside the other Starbucks drinks on this site — the lavender matcha, the cherry cold foam and the Valentine's drink — and if the lemonade is the part worth making from scratch, the Chick-fil-A lemonade is the base to start from. For a hot tea with no brand behind it at all, there is the Costa Rican tea.