The 16 All-Time Best Ways To Customize Your Starbucks Order

After you've had your fair share of Starbucks drinks, you might be on the lookout for how to make them even better. While Starbucks certainly has paired down its menu, there are still many ways to customize your drink to achieve something that is far more personalized. Based on my experiences as a barista and coffee lover, I've collected the all-time very best ways to customize your next Starbucks order.

While I tend to be more of an iced coffee fan, several of these work well for both hot and cold options, while others can make your particularly hot drinks special. No matter your favorite drink, opportunities abound to make it unique to your preferences. Plus, you can often make these requests right from the Starbucks app. These customizations go far beyond the obvious syrup flavoring additions. My hope is that these will take your typical coffee run from an everyday, mundane chore to a revitalized order you'll look forward to ordering time and time again.

Possibly one of the most under-appreciated drink modifications deals with the type of milk you choose for your drink. Many Starbucks customers will simply assume that their drink is nearly unchanged based on the milk, and others only swap out the milk if it's a dietary need. However, the type of milk you choose for your drink can completely change the flavor and texture. Possibly the biggest example of this transformation comes from the vanilla sweet cream swap. If you've had cold foam on top of your drinks in the past, there's a good chance you've had vanilla sweet cream as part of your drink, but for this modification, I recommend changing the actual milk of your drink to vanilla sweet cream, instead of simply using it for the cold foam.

One of the best ways to make this swap shine is by utilizing it with your favorite warm drink. During the winter months, I find it to be especially lovely with secret menu holiday drinks. It definitely makes for a sweeter drink, but it is richer, too. The drink becomes smoother, feels softer, and has a decadence to it, something akin to a holiday-time dessert. While hot drinks get a huge upgrade with the swap; it's also a change you can make to your cold drinks. This can be especially handy if you just want your drink to be a little bit sweeter without adding a whole lot more syrup to it.

One of my favorite ways to liven up Starbucks teas and refreshers is to add juice. Once upon a time, Starbucks offered apple juice as one of the juice offerings, but, alas, the long age of apple juice at Starbucks has met its end. At the time of writing, the only juice offering is a peach juice blend. On the base menu, baristas use this ingredient for the Iced Peach Green Tea and lemonade drinks. However, that is far from the only drink you can make with this juice.

Starbucks offers three types of tea: black, green, and passion tea. All three go very well with this peach juice blend. If you choose the herbal passion tea and mix it with this juice, you'll end up with a secret menu drink perfect for fall. Add the freeze-dried Refreshers inclusions, and you end up with something like a sangria. I've had this drink in the past with the apple juice when it was offered, but once that disappeared from the menu, the peach juice combination works well (honestly better), too.

Starbucks' mocha isn't a sweet and smooth chocolate. It is more bitter and something closer to a dark chocolate, so it doesn't run as sweet as some people would hope for in their chocolate drinks. As a result, drinks like mochas and hot chocolates (which rely on the mocha sauce for flavor) often don't satisfy the sweet, chocolatey taste customers might hope for. To help get that sweeter taste, I recommend tempering your mocha-heavy drink with another sauce.

For simply a more sugary-tasting chocolate, white chocolate mocha typically does the trick. Depending on the level of sweetness you're going for, an even split of white chocolate mocha and regular mocha should suffice. If you choose this method, the secret menu drink is commonly known as a tuxedo mocha. For a caffeine free version, and even better Starbucks hot chocolate, a tuxedo hot chocolate is just the ticket. If you happen to be ordering when the famous PSL (pumpkin spice latte) is in full bloom, consider adding pumpkin spice sauce to your mocha for an unexpected fall treat.

When you think of Starbucks' coffee drink offerings, there's a good chance you're not imagining a terribly fresh-tasting drink. Instead, it's going to be rich or smooth, but fresh is reserved mostly for those teas and Refreshers. However, with one simple addition, you can take your mochas from tasting rich and decadent to fresh and still dessert-like.

Please note that the strawberry purée is really not one you'll want to add to a drink that doesn't go in the blender or get shaken. So for this little customization, stick mostly to Frappuccinos for a better consistency with the blended liquid.

There are two ways you can ask for your strawberry purée to be added in. You can simply request it be added to the drink, and likely blended right in, or you can ask your barista to pour it in interspersed with the blended liquid. I love the look of the second option, so that's what I typically go for, but in my experience, the flavor impact is mostly the same.

When I was a barista who worked at Starbucks, one of my all-time favorite drinks to make was the iced caramel macchiato. The drink has a very specific preparation process, beginning with your vanilla syrup at the bottom of the cup, followed by milk and ice. Then, the espresso shots get poured on top with the caramel drizzle marking the top of the icy drink. While macchiatos are delicious this way, there's another way, and I think it makes for a better drink.

If made upside down, the macchiato is made with the espresso toward the bottom of the drink with the ice and milk going in later. When done this way, I've found that the iced drink gets a better mix and everything comes together quicker. When you have your macchiatos made upside down, you can also more easily have sauces added to the macchiatos because the sauce and espresso can be mixed a little easier than if the macchiato were made traditionally.

If you've ever ordered an espresso drink and found it had something of a bitter or burnt taste to it, you're not alone. To help remedy this flavor, ordering the blonde espresso roast in place of the signature espresso roast is a tasty swap that makes your drink smoother and just the smallest amount sweeter.

This change is possible with all espresso-based drinks at Starbucks, though there are a few (like the cortado) that use the blonde roast as a default. In these cases, leave the blonde roast as the selected roast. Though you might be tempted to scale back any sweetener or syrups with the change to the lighter roast, I encourage you to try it as you normally would for the first order. If you need to scale back on future drinks, you always can, but I think you'll find the blonde roast softens that espresso bite the perfect amount without totally mellowing out the experience.

Perhaps the superhero of all customizations you can make to your drink is adding Starbucks cold foam. As a default, various offerings of cold brew will have a topper with cold foam, but they are not the only ones that taste great with this creamy and flavorful addition.

One of my favorite ways to take an upside-down caramel macchiato to the next level is by topping it with Salted Caramel Cream Cold Foam. This is also a stellar addition to an Iced Shaken Brown Sugar Oat Milk Espresso. Granted, the full dairy cold foam will make this shaken espresso drink no longer dairy-free, but I love the way these two milks play off of one another.

It's always been fairly easy to ask for custom cold foam in off-menu flavors, but Starbucks has greatly increased its cold foam options that are easy to order from the app. These many options allow for a delicious amount of creativity, like topping an iced chai with a matcha cold foam or doing it for a chocolate-covered strawberry flavor with a mocha cold foam atop a Strawberry Açaí Refreshers.

If you've committed to enjoying matcha drinks, you may find that the drink has a leafy flavor that is something of an acquired taste. In finding the precise way you like to enjoy your matcha lattes, I recommend playing around with syrups, milks, and temperature. Starbucks offers its matchas hot, iced, or even blended with ice as a Frappuccino.

If you're going for iced or frozen, you may find cold foam to be a delicious add. Since the cold foam comes in so many different flavors, you'll be adding a creaminess with a touch of flavor with the addition. Experimenting with the different flavors, like strawberry, mocha, and even hazelnut will make your drink taste better and help you discover your particular favorite way to enjoy matcha.

By far, my favorite cold foam to add to an iced matcha latte has been lavender cream cold foam. Unfortunately, Starbucks' lavender drinks, and, therefore, the lavender powder used to create them, seem to be a spring ingredient, and one that isn't necessarily promised each year.

While regular cold foam is absolutely delicious, aside from adding some creaminess and flavor, its primary function is pretty basic. If you want to give that cold foam a real job to do, you can superpower your drink by adding protein cold foam.

Typically, I am not a proponent of protein drinks. I find the texture to be too chalky and not at all pleasant. Not to mention, the drinks tend to take on a certain flavor that I can't get past. However, the cold foam with protein added to it does not have the same issues. In fact, I have found that the protein cold foams taste just as good as regular cold foams, but your drink is going to fill you up. When I am in situations where I know I need a drink to tide me over before a next meal, the protein powder packed cold foam is especially beneficial.

Starbucks baristas make the chain's whipped cream. It comes together in CO2 whipped cream canisters with heavy whipping cream, vanilla syrup, and some good shakes. While the whipped cream is delicious, the cold foam is a flavor upgrade. Any drink that has whipped cream can have cold foam instead.

Aside from the benefit of all that additional flavor, the cold foam does a much better job melting into your drink than whipped cream. Every time I've gotten whipped cream on an iced drink, for instance, I end up with a pile of whipped cream and ice at the bottom of my cup when I've finished. With cold foam, that flavored, creamy goodness integrates and becomes part of the drink. Several Frappuccinos now have cold foam on the drinks as a default, indicating that this switch really does play well with many types of drinks.

A dirty chai is a chai latte with espresso added to it. This was my first secret menu drink I tried after becoming a barista, and I must say, the addition does great things for the chai, making it one of the absolute best Starbucks chai drinks.

Whether you're going for an iced chai latte or a hot one, the espresso addition works well with the spiciness of the chai and accentuates the bite of the espresso just enough. If you find that the espresso warrants the need for more smoothness, this is another fine opportunity to add in that cold foam. Since the chai and espresso already add so much additional flavor to an already flavor-heavy drink, you might find the simple vanilla sweet cream cold foam to be the most ideal option to add a layer of smoothness rather than smothering the taste with more flavoring elements.

While I enjoy pumpkin spice lattes, I've found that they aren't quite the right collection of flavors for me. Instead, they need some tweaking for them to be especially enjoyable. No offense to Starbucks' seminal seasonal drink, but a pumpkin spice latte is infinitely better with white chocolate mocha.

The addition of white chocolate mocha to pumpkin spice turns this humble pumpkin spice latte into a Cinderella Latte, possibly one of the best pop culture-inspired secret menu drinks out there. Make this very easy by ordering your drink in the app. Take the pumpkin spice sauce pumps down to half and add white chocolate mocha to fill in the rest. Because of this mixture, it tends to work best if the drink calls for an even number of pumps. In an iced version, that will be a grande or venti with four or six pumps of total sauce, respectively. For a hot drink, the grande is the ideal choice since it calls for four pumps of sauce. You'll want to pay special attention to the number of sauce pumps because too many can impact the texture of the drink.

One of the many ways people enjoy creating secret menu drinks is by mimicking a popular flavor they already love. These drinks come from combining flavors using a variety of customizations. One of my favorite flavors is Nutella, both as a snack and that tasty filling inside of a Ferrero Rocher candy. Through some clever flavor mixing, you can achieve something that tastes suspiciously similar.

To create this chocolate hazelnut flavor, simply add hazelnut syrup to your mocha-flavored drinks. Since hazelnut syrup is very thin, you can add this nutty flavor to Starbucks drinks regardless of their temperature. Unlike sauce flavors like white chocolate mocha and pumpkin spice, hazelnut won't impact the texture of the drink, only the flavor, so melting into what's already there isn't something you'll need to keep in mind. Just how much hazelnut you'll want to add should depend on how strongly you want the flavor combination to be.

When you think of caramel macchiatos, there's a good chance you think of a heavily caramelized drink, and it's no wonder with all of that caramel drizzle on top. However, the caramel drizzle is the only caramel flavor element in the drink. The syrup included in the drink is actually vanilla.

This vanilla syrup is an easy substitution to make and can easily be swapped with any other syrup. Say, for instance, you really want that caramel to pop. You can request that your vanilla syrup be caramel instead. That said, if you choose to change this syrup to one of Starbucks' sauces, be sure to have your macchiatos made upside down so that the espresso has a chance to melt that sauce. This is another good place to try that mocha and hazelnut flavor combination for a Nutella-type macchiato. For even more chocolate flavor, ask your barista to substitute the caramel drizzle for mocha.

If you've ever been drinking your chai lattes, iced teas, or Refreshers drinks and thought that it tasted a little bland, you might be one of the many who would prefer their drink without water. These drinks use water to help create a balance for the drink, but they are certainly more flavorful without this addition.

With a hot chai, your drink will take on a milkier flavor as your barista will replace what had been water with your chosen milk. When you order a Refresher without water, on the other hand, you'll get extra Refreshers base. When ordering on the app, you'll even see that you have a choice on which base you want to add. This makes it easy to mix the bases together for a unique combination. For iced teas, you can order without water and this subtraction will be replaced with more tea or even Refreshers base or juice.

One of my favorite ways to craft an ultra-customized drink is by starting with a very basic base. The iced espresso option allows you to build a drink that includes only items and ingredients you specifically want with no extras. For instance, you could order an iced espresso with several different kinds of syrups and a cold foam topper, specify the size of drink cup you want, and end up with a wholly unique drink that would be very difficult to order otherwise.

It just so happens that I discovered my new favorite luxury drink when it was originally posted on the Starbucks not-so-secret menu Instagram broadcast channel. When I really want a treat, I order an iced triple blonde espresso with two pumps of caramel syrup, two pumps of brown sugar syrup, about ½ inch of oat milk, and the protein salted caramel cold foam, all in a venti cup. I also request that the barista line the cup and top with caramel drizzle. This drink is extravagant, but reasonably priced since I started the order with an iced espresso. In ordering this way, I get to add my own creativity.