10 Add-Ins To Upgrade Your Starbucks Lemonade

Starbucks harbors a secret: Some of the very best drinks are lemonade-based. Don't like anything you see? Create your own with some fabulous add-ins. Like most coffee shops, Starbucks encourages customers to order drinks exactly how they want them. Even still, when I worked at Starbucks, the idea of a secret menu was nearly non-existent. Nearly all orders were placed from the base menu with few changes, with a few exceptions for allergies. Customers who took the drink far from its original stood out as finicky. Fast forward to now, however, and I've become one of those customers, recommending order swaps and even creating secret menu holiday drinks. Since lemonade is such a basic drink at Starbucks, it's really viewed as more of an ingredient for other offerings than a standalone drink, so customization opportunities abound.

With lemonade available year-round, it's the ideal base for a refreshing beverage and a departure from coffee, should you want it. Its permanent status in the barista fridge means that it's always around, and since there are plenty of fruity ways to dress it up, customers have a wide variety of ingredients to work with. While there is no defined secret menu hiding in a briefcase under the register, sprucing up your lemonade may make you feel like a menu mixologist. 

If you love iced tea and lemonade together, you'll be pleased to know that Starbucks has long had iced tea and lemonade mixtures on its menu — it's the best way to enjoy Starbucks' iced tea, to be honest. There's no need to customize these unless you wish to. There are options for passion tea, black tea, green tea, or matcha mixed with lemonade. None of these drinks come sweetened (aside from the sugar from the lemonade), so if you wish to add more flavoring or sweetener, be sure to include that in your order in the app or in person.

Your barista will prepare your mixture of iced tea and lemonade using a shaker meant for this explicit purpose. That is, unless you ask for your iced tea to be made in a layered fashion. This isn't super common, but if you ask for it at the counter, I can't imagine a barista saying no. After all, it saves them the time it would take to shake the drink.

Of the iced tea with lemonade choices, the iced Passion Tango Tea Lemonade is my favorite. As an herbal tea, it's an ideal drink when you want a hydrating — rather than super caffeinated — beverage. I like to get mine with liquid sweetener. Sometimes, if ordering in person, your barista may ask whether you want it sweetened, but adding sweetener is easy to miss if you're ordering in the mobile app. Still, I've noticed that some baristas will prepare teas sweetened unless otherwise specified, so it's helpful to clarify right from the jump.

Like the tea menu, there are several Refreshers you can order with a lemonade mixture; baristas use it in place of water when preparing the drink. All four of the lemonade Refreshers currently on the menu are perfectly tasty and sweet, but I am especially fond of the newest Cran-Merry Orange Lemonade Refreshers (part of the leveled-up 2024 Starbucks holiday menu). While cranberries are a winter-heavy flavor, I can imagine enjoying this one year-round, although I'm mostly certain that it's going to disappear by the end of the holiday season.

In any case, Strawberry Açaí Lemonade is a good alternative. As someone who frequently orders strawberry lemonade at restaurants, I find that it closely resembles that flavor profile. If you order it as the base drink off the menu, the Refreshers automatically include freeze-dried fruit, which is always a nice addition.

When ordering the lemonade Refreshers in person, be sure to double-check that your barista heard you say "lemonade" at the end of your drink order. On more than one occasion, especially at busy Starbucks locations where baristas are trying to move through orders rather quickly, I've noticed they will select the wrong drink from the options on their screen. This could happen because the designation "lemonade" comes so late in the order that they miss it, listening to the flavor at the beginning. 

Starbucks keeps a couple of juices in the bar fridge for baristas to use. As new drinks roll out throughout the year, more juices sometimes arrive, and any of these are options for you to add to your lemonade. Apple juice has long been a part of the fridge stock, but as of this writing, there's also a peach juice blend available. Baristas use peach juice primarily in the iced peach tea and lemonade varieties. Before the peach and mango syrups were cut in 2017, baristas prepared peach green tea using a flavored syrup, but now, it gets that peach taste from juice.

One TikTok user and Starbucks barista shared a delicious mixture of juice and lemonade, perfect for when you want some extra sweetened and tart juice. She prepared a drink of half apple juice and half lemonade with some of the honey blend sweetener syrup. Though she used honey sweetener, that's not the only sweetener that works here. You could also request different proportions for a juice or lemonade heavier drink.

When Starbucks rolls out new seasonal offerings, I get so excited. One of the best parts about new items being added to the Starbucks menu is that all of those ingredients used to make new drinks become additions you can include to your own customizations. For instance, every time a new Refresher gets released, I am eager to try the new fruit add-ins it will bring to the menu. At the time of writing, there are four different kinds of inclusions you can add to your drinks: Cranberry, strawberry, dragonfruit, and pineapple. In the customization portion of the Starbucks app, you'll use a drop-down to select whatever add-ins you'd like. But you don't have to choose just one; instead, select as many, in whatever varieties, you want. You can even add them all.

Since these fruits are added as freeze-dried fruits, the more time they get in the liquid of your lemonade to rehydrate, the softer and more enjoyable they will be. And in no time, it'll feel like you're sipping on lemonade with fresh fruit.

A rather obvious but overlooked addition to lemonade is ice. If you were to order a lemonade, it would come iced right out of the gate, but you can give it an even icier feel by making your iced lemonade into a frozen lemonade. Unfortunately, there isn't a base drink on the menu that you can simply order as a blended lemonade (even though there is a blended strawberry lemonade). That doesn't, however, mean that baristas won't make it happen for you.

Whether ordering in person or over the app, taking a few extra moments to customize your drink for a frosty treat will be worth it, especially on a hot day. If ordering in person, simply request that your lemonade be blended rather than shaken. If ordering over the Starbucks app, you'll find a preparation methods section with a drop-down. Here, you'll select blended.

Before you order a blended lemonade, I must caution that blended lemonades tend to separate quite quickly. As a result, you'll want to try and drink it in a rather timely fashion. As someone who frequently struggles to get through drinks in any kind of sensical time frame, this is always a problem for me. The problem is only heightened when the drink takes on a consistency completely different from what the drink began as.

Though inclusions soften with time, sometimes, this texture isn't the best fit for your drink. Thankfully, inclusions aren't the only type of fruit you can add to your lemonades; strawberry puree is also an option. In fact, aside from an iced lemonade, a blended strawberry lemonade is the only other fairly simple lemonade drink on the menu. Rather than using the freeze-dried strawberry inclusions for this beverage, your barista will blend up lemonade, ice, and strawberry puree to achieve a blended strawberry lemonade. Baristas also use strawberry puree in the frozen Refreshers line of drinks to make red swirls on the sides.

While I enjoy a blended lemonade, I like a shaken strawberry lemonade even better. To do this, I recommend beginning with a basic lemonade and adding both strawberry puree and strawberry inclusions. This way, you'll get a consistent flavoring from the different berry textures. Your drink will be strawberry-flavored throughout, but you also get that extra burst of fruitiness from your freeze-dried strawberry inclusions.

Once upon a time, Starbucks had several fruit syrup flavors. Those who loved Starbucks' raspberry syrup remember this time fondly; unfortunately, raspberry syrup and most other fruit flavors largely disappeared, with one exception: Apple brown sugar. Even then, this syrup only sprouts up in the fall and winter, so it's a rarity too.

It may be tempting to believe — with the disappearance of the fruit-flavored syrups — that there aren't many syrups suited well for lemonades. This isn't the case if you're willing to look outside the box. Brown sugar syrup, for example, is one of the Starbucks syrup flavors that not only makes a tasty addition to coffee and espresso-based drinks but would also go well with lemonade. Since brown sugar is essentially white sugar with molasses added to it, you experience more of a richly flavored drink. While I understand that some may like their lemonade to be more on the light and refreshing side, those who want a lemonade that leans a little stronger and sweeter will no doubt enjoy the addition of brown sugar syrup.

For those who want a creamy flavor without a change in texture, vanilla does a lot of heavy lifting. With some pumps of vanilla, you'll add warmth and depth to your lemonade. That might not be a super common way to enjoy lemonade, but works well for desserts, so it could work well in your order, too.

Honey has long been an option for sweetening teas and coffees at Starbucks. When I was a barista, it came in little condiment packets, and, at the time, we used them to sweeten oatmeal or the occasional tea order. However, Starbucks now offers a liquid honey syrup. You won't find it under syrups in the app; instead, it's listed under liquid sweeteners. This honey blend is more like a watered-down version of honey. It's more liquidy so it blends into drinks easier. I find that the honey packets taste much better, so I recommend adding those to your lemonade rather than the honey blend.

If you choose honey packets over the honey blend, you may find that your honeyed lemonade drink needs a little extra stirring or shaking, so this would be one of the ideal times to consider ordering your drink blended. That way, the honey has plenty of opportunity to thoroughly mix into the rest of the liquid. If you don't want a blended drink, but you're concerned that the barista won't take the time to mix it in or shake it well, go for the honey blend sweetener. I'd rather have well-mixed honey flavoring (even if it is a little watered down) than a drink with gobs of honey at the bottom.

If you're anything like me, when you think of lemonade, the next thing that comes to mind isn't milk. However, certain mixtures utilize milk and lemonade to create something refreshing and unique. One TikTok user and barista makes a colada refresher by shaking together lemonade, coconut milk, and vanilla bean powder. The same drink could be made blended for an even smoother consistency. But the shaker method seems to work well too, since coconut milk is already an element in many Starbucks drinks with fruity flavors — like those in Refreshers.

Plant-based milks aren't the only kind you can mix with lemonade. If you tend to lean toward a dairy-based drink or need to avoid a particular plant-based option, dairy milk works too. Starbucks offers many dairy choices including vanilla sweet cream and heavy cream, but the most common milk varieties like whole, 2%, and skim are options too.

Another barista and TikTok user created a recipe similar to the colada refresher by substituting coconut milk for whole milk and adding toffee nut syrup. Unfortunately, toffee nut syrup has been discontinued at Starbucks, so you won't be able to add that flavor, but hazelnut should do just fine. All of this goes into a blender. This one is something like a lemon bar Frappuccino, but I think it would make a perfect dessert drink or a delicious middle-of-the-day option without caffeine. Unfortunately, these aren't drinks you'll be able to order from the app, so they're requests you'll need to make in person at the counter.

It's easy to forget that Starbucks has powders for drinks in addition to flavoring syrups. In some drinks, these powders do an even better job of flavoring your order than a syrup addition would. Currently, as I'm daydreaming of these options, there are two powders you have to work with: Matcha and vanilla bean. In the spring, Starbucks temporarily offered a lavender powder, but it was only offered seasonally. The lavender lemonade was the pink Starbucks treat I didn't even know I needed, but matcha and vanilla bean have a place with lemonade, too. 

Bright green and becoming very popular with secret menu creators, matcha makes an earthy addition to very sweet lemonade. There's even a whole drink dedicated to it on the menu. Vanilla bean, on the other hand, is more difficult to find a place for, but with a little creativity, you can take the flavors of lemonade and vanilla and mimic popular desserts. However you choose to add powder to your drink, you'll want to pay close attention to its preparation method. Drinks with powders added to them are ideal candidates for blending. On an especially busy day, if you're worried that the barista doesn't have enough time to properly shake your drink (or might attempt to skip this step altogether), I recommend choosing blended instead. Making this easy customization will help ensure that the grittiness that can sometimes come from powder doesn't rear its ugly head in your customized lemonade.