Flat white or latte: what actually differs

The volumes, and why everything else follows

A flat white is about 160 ml in the cup. Roughly 110 ml of that is milk, poured over a double shot with a few millimetres of foam on top. A latte is 220 to 240 ml, of which around 200 ml is milk. Almost every other difference between the two drinks is a consequence of that one number.

160 ml

Flat white

About three parts milk to one of coffee, over a double ristretto.

vs

235 ml

Caffe latte

Nearer six to one, over an ordinary double.

Flat whiteof the cup

• Microfoam15 ml9%
• Steamed milk110 ml69%
• Crema5 ml3%
• Double ristretto30 ml19%

Caffe latteof the cup

• Foam20 ml9%
• Steamed milk175 ml74%
• Crema5 ml2%
• Double espresso35 ml15%

Look at what the ratios do. A flat white runs at something close to three parts milk to one part coffee. A latte is nearer six to one. Adding another 90 ml of milk does not make the drink a bit milkier; it moves the coffee from the front of the flavour to somewhere behind it, where it reads as warmth and colour rather than as a taste in its own right. That is a legitimate thing to want. It is also why a latte is the more forgiving drink and the flat white is the one that exposes a bad shot.

Cup size is not decoration here. Pour a flat white build into a 240 ml cup and you have made a thin latte. Pour a latte build into a 160 ml tulip and either it overflows or you cut the milk, which is a flat white by accident.

The base: a double ristretto against a normal double

The second real difference is what is under the milk. A flat white is traditionally built on a double ristretto: 20 g of coffee stopped at about 32 g in the cup, which is a ratio of roughly 1:1.6. A latte takes an ordinary double, 18 g in to 36 g out, at 1:2.

Stopping the shot early keeps the sweet, syrupy, heavy part of the extraction and leaves the thin, drying tail in the basket. Drunk black, a ristretto can taste unfinished. Under 110 ml of milk it does not, because what survives the milk is body and sweetness, and those are exactly what the early part of a shot carries. This is the reason a flat white tastes concentrated rather than simply strong.

A latte has the opposite problem to solve. Two hundred millilitres of milk will bury a small shot, so the fuller, longer 1:2 extraction is the right call there, and past about 200 ml of milk it is worth going further and pulling a triple.

Texture: two seconds of air against one

Milk for a flat white gets about two seconds of aeration, taken while the milk is still cold, and then twenty seconds of spinning to fold that air through. Milk for a latte gets one second. A cappuccino, for scale, gets three to four.

Those two seconds are the whole reason the flat white is the drink you can actually pour a pattern on. One second of air gives hot milk with a whisper of a lid on it: pleasant to drink, but there is not enough white microfoam to carry a shape, and in a wide cup holding 200 ml of liquid whatever you drew disperses. Two seconds gives milk that moves like wet paint, dense enough to float on the crema and hold an edge, in a cup small enough that the pattern fills it.

Go past that and it stops working again. Four seconds of air is cappuccino milk, which sits on the surface and lands as a blob. The window is narrower than most people expect, and it is set at the start of the steam, not at the end.

Where the drink came from

The flat white is Antipodean, from the mid-1980s, and that is about as precise as anyone can honestly be. Both Australia and New Zealand claim it. Individual cafes in Sydney, Canberra, Auckland and Wellington have all been put forward as the first to write the name on a board, and the supporting evidence in every case is a recollection rather than a document. Cafe menus are not archived, so the record is thin and likely to stay that way.

What can be said is what the drink was reacting to. Espresso culture in both countries had absorbed the Italian cappuccino and then drifted away from it, towards less foam and a more integrated pour, and “flat” is a description of exactly that: milk that is flat rather than domed with froth. From there the drink travelled with the people who made it. Australian and New Zealander baristas working in London through the 2000s put it on menus across the city, and from London it spread into the rest of Europe and eventually onto the boards of American chains, which is where most of the world met it.

Treat all of that as history rather than as a claim about quality. The useful part is the definition, and the definition has held: small, ristretto based, barely aerated, poured so the coffee stays in front.