Strawberry Acai Refresher (Starbucks Copycat Recipe)

The Açaí berry, pronounced (ah-sigh-ee), took the world by storm in the nineties. The tropical Amazon fruit is a superfood for the outrageous amounts of antioxidants it adds to your diet, amongst other health benefits. 

The purple berry soon went from super healthy to super trendy, and sometime in the first decade of the new century, Starbucks made a tasty and somewhat healthy refresher with the superfood. The strawberry acai refresher was born, and today we’re making ours at home!

This recipe is quite simple, but the ingredients are hard to find and exotic. If you want to prepare the real deal, you must get yourself a bag of freeze-dried strawberries. You won’t regret it, this is astronaut food, it’s amazing! All the flavor of strawberries frozen in time with unlimited shelf life. If you haven’t tried these, you’ll love them, and you’ll enjoy them not only in refreshments. 

The other interesting ingredient is the freeze-dried acai berries themselves. You’ll find these online and in health stores. They’re also sold as a puree, but today we want the freeze-dried version, and although they’re a bit expensive, a little goes a long way. Besides, this stuff is super healthy, so you can use whatever is left of it in smoothies and homemade acai bowls. 

Starbucks’ baristas make the strawberry acai refresher with freeze-dried strawberries, ice and strawberry acai base, which apparently has no acai berries at all, but a bit of green coffee bean powder. 

Ours will be similar, so make sure you buy some green coffee bean powder, although it’s optional. The final ingredients are white grape juice and passion fruit syrup, which you’ll also find easily — Monin is a great brand.

This is not your typical drink. It’s an odd one for sure, and the ingredients are not readily available in any supermarket, but that’s the glorious thing about challenges, you have to work for this one! 

Once you get your ingredients, building this refresher is as easy as blending everything together, literally. If you’re ready, let’s make ourselves a strawberry acai refresher Starbucks copycat!