A Starbucks Honey Deuce drink inspired by the US Open’s signature cocktail has been circulating on social media, with one TikTok creator’s version coming in at $17.37, only about six dollars short of the real thing. The custom order, built from a grande lemonade, two pumps of raspberry syrup, two scoops of mango pearls and three Birthday Cake Pops, has become one of the more elaborate off-menu builds to ride the tournament’s annual wave.
The original Honey Deuce, served at the US Open, is a $23 cocktail made with Grey Goose vodka, lemonade and raspberry liqueur, finished with honeydew melon balls. It is the kind of drink that has developed a following well beyond the grounds of Flushing Meadows, and the numbers behind it have grown accordingly.
The Honey Deuce by the numbers
According to ESPN, fans consumed 738,459 Honey Deuces in 2025, generating more than $17 million in sales. That is a long way from the cocktail’s debut in 2007, when 24,000 were sold at $12 each. The current $23 price sits more than 90% above that original figure. To keep up with demand, 8,000 cases of honeydew melons (enough to fill eight semi-trucks) make the three-to-four-day journey from California to New York each year for the tournament alone.
Those melon balls are, as anyone who has ordered one will tell you, half the point. They sit in the cup like pale green spheres and do the visual work that turns a lemonade cocktail into something worth photographing. Which makes the Starbucks interpretation’s choice of garnish all the more interesting.
What the Starbucks Honey Deuce drink actually delivers
TikTok user Heather Roberts showed off her version recently, walking through the order: a grande lemonade with two pumps of raspberry syrup, two scoops of mango pearls and three Birthday Cake Pops balanced on top. The total came to $17.37. Roberts described the drink itself as nicely balanced, with tart raspberry lemonade and bursts of sweetness from the mango pearls. She added, though, that she would not spend that much on a Starbucks drink again, a sentiment echoed widely in the comments.
The Birthday Cake Pops are doing a fair amount of the pricing work here. Three of them add up quickly, and as a garnish they are a loose substitute for melon balls at best, sitting on the rim rather than bobbing inside the cup, and functioning more as a bonus dessert than a visual callback to the original cocktail. There is no honeydew involved at any stage of the process.
None of that is a surprise. The Starbucks version was never going to replicate the original, and the appeal is fairly straightforward: it is a non-alcoholic, tournament-adjacent order that photographs well and fits inside the broader culture of off-menu social media builds. The chain has had a long-running unofficial secret menu, driven by customers sharing increasingly elaborate customisations online, and in 2025 it formalised part of that by adding rotating fan-created drinks to the Starbucks app, though that has done little to slow the flow of original inventions.
Whether the Starbucks Honey Deuce drink is worth $17.37 depends almost entirely on how much you value the aesthetic. The raspberry lemonade base works. The mango pearls add texture. And if the alternative is queuing at Arthur Ashe Stadium and handing over $23 for the genuine article, the gap is smaller than it looks on paper, even if the melon balls remain firmly out of reach.