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.

What Starbucks puts in a Medicine Ball

The drink began as an off-menu order. Customers asked for two teas together, with steamed lemonade in place of half the water and honey on top, often enough that Starbucks put it on the menu in 2017 as Honey Citrus Mint Tea. Its menu page still calls it "a customer creation so popular it’s now on the menu".

The ingredient list has three parts: an infusion of green tea, apple, rose hips, lemon verbena, spearmint, chamomile, licorice and lemongrass; lemonade made of water, lemon juice, sugar and lemon oil; and a honey blend, which is honey thinned with water. The infusion is two tea bags: Jade Citrus Mint, the green tea with the mint, and Peach Tranquility, the herbal one.

The cup made here, with a full cup of lemonade and a tablespoon of honey, comes out above the 130 calories Starbucks lists; its figure is in the recipe card.

Food Network notes that the drink does not cure a cold. It is a hot, sweet, minty tea, and this page makes no other claim for it. The recipe is a reconstruction, and MakeFoodLovely is not connected with Starbucks.

Recipe

Starbucks Medicine Ball Tea

A reconstruction of Starbucks' Honey Citrus Mint Tea — two Teavana tea bags steeped in hot water, topped with warm lemonade and honey. One grande.

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Prep

2 min

Cook

5 min

Total

7 min

Serves

1

Cuisine

American

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.

Nutrition

Calories:

165

Calculated from the ingredient quantities above using the USDA FoodData Central database, then divided by the number of servings. It is an estimate and will vary with the exact products you use.

Steeping the Medicine Ball at home

The tea bags steep in plain hot water first. Lemonade that has only been warmed until it steams is cooler than boiling water, and tea brewed in the mixture comes out weaker. The lemonade goes in afterwards. The honey is stirred into the hot tea before the lemonade cools it; added at the end, it sits at the bottom of the mug.

• 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 20-ounce mug, use a cup and a quarter of each.
• Lemonade: Starbucks lists its own as water, lemon juice, sugar and lemon oil. A bottled lemonade is the equivalent; a tart home-made one takes an extra teaspoon of honey.

Getting the two teas

Jade Citrus Mint and Peach Tranquility are Teavana blends, the tea brand Starbucks owns. If they are not on the shelf, match them by what is in them. For the first, use a green tea with spearmint, or a plain green tea bag plus a few fresh mint leaves. For the second, use a chamomile herbal tea with peach or rose hips.

Of the two, the green mint tea carries the flavours the drink is named for; the herbal one adds sweetness and no caffeine. For a hot tea with no brand behind it at all, there is the Costa Rican 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. Tea brewed at normal strength is diluted by the melting ice; the double-strength steep allows for that.

Other Starbucks drinks rebuilt on this site include the lavender matcha and the Valentine's drink, and the cherry cold foam goes on any iced one.