Cuban Coffee (Café Cubano): How to Make the Sweet Espumita

Café cubano is strong, dark-roast coffee sweetened in a particular way: the first drops from the pot are whipped hard with sugar into a pale, creamy foam called espuma or espumita, and the rest of the coffee is stirred into it. To make it at home, brew dark, finely ground coffee in a moka pot, catch about two teaspoons of the first coffee on three tablespoons of sugar, whip it to a thick paste, then pour in the rest of the pot and serve in small cups.

Also called a cafecito, a Cuban shot or simply Cuban coffee, it is one of the defining tastes of Cuba and of Cuban-American life in Miami, Tampa and the Florida Keys.

The recipe

1. Set the moka pot going on medium heat: water to just below the valve, the basket filled level with coffee. The moka pot guide covers the technique.
2. Put the sugar in a small jug.
3. Catch the first coffee. As soon as it starts to appear, pour about two teaspoons onto the sugar and return the pot to the heat.
4. Whip the espumita. Beat the sugar and coffee hard with a spoon for a minute or two, until the mixture lightens into a thick, pale, creamy paste.
5. Combine. When the pot has finished, pour the rest of the coffee slowly into the espumita, stirring gently. A light-brown foam rises to the top.
6. Serve in small cups, making sure each gets some foam.

Cuban-style coffee uses dark roasts — Italian or Spanish roast — and in Cuban-American cafés brands such as Café Bustelo, Café La Llave and Café Pilón are the familiar ones. An espresso machine works too, but the moka pot is the everyday home method.

Why the espumita works

The espumita is not just a flourish; it changes how much sugar the coffee can hold.

Hot coffee dissolves far more sugar. Sucrose is very soluble, and much more so when hot: about 2.01 g dissolves in each millilitre of water at 20 °C, rising to about 2.6 g at 50 °C and over 4 g at 90 °C. The first coffee from the pot is hot and concentrated, and whipping it with sugar works a large amount of sugar into solution and suspension in a small volume. Wikipedia's account of the drink notes that the result is sweeter and slightly more viscous than a normal shot or sugar added at the table.

Whipping traps air. Beating the thick, syrupy mixture folds in tiny bubbles, and the concentrated coffee and sugar keep them from escaping quickly. When the rest of the coffee goes in, that foam floats to the top as a creamy, light-brown layer — the Cuban answer to crema, made by hand.

Because moka pot coffee is concentrated — a 2013 comparison of nine brewing methods grouped moka coffee with the espressos rather than the long coffees — it stands up to that much sugar without tasting thin.

How sweet, and how strong

Café cubano is meant to be sweet. Three tablespoons of sugar is about 40 g, or roughly 13 g and 52 kcal in each of three small cups — around half of the 25 g of free sugars a day below which the World Health Organization says there are further health benefits.

Caffeine depends on the coffee. A three-cup moka pot holds 15–17 g of ground coffee, and arabica beans contain about 12 mg of caffeine per gram of dry mass, so the whole pot starts with roughly 180–200 mg. Split three ways, each cup carries at most about 60–70 mg, and somewhat less in practice, because not all the caffeine is extracted. Blends that include robusta, which has roughly twice the caffeine of arabica, push that higher — the arabica and robusta guide explains the difference. The caffeine guide puts those figures in context.

The Cuban coffee family

• Cortadito — Cuban coffee topped with steamed milk, anywhere from equal parts to three parts coffee to one of milk, and already sweetened. The Spanish cortado is its unsweetened cousin.
• Café con leche — espresso served with a cup of hot or steamed milk, poured in to the colour you like and stirred; the traditional Cuban breakfast, with buttered, toasted Cuban bread for dipping.
• Colada — three to six shots of Cuban coffee in one cup, handed round with tiny plastic cups for sharing, a ritual of workplace breaks in Cuban communities.

In Miami, Cuban coffee is sold through walk-up windows called ventanitas, often with a tostada — buttered Cuban bread — or a pastelito.

Coffee in Cuba

Coffee came to Cuba in 1748, when José Antonio Gelabert introduced the first plant. From 1791, French planters fleeing the Haitian Revolution brought better methods and helped coffee farms spread from the western plains into the nearby mountains, and by the mid-1950s Cuba was exporting more than 20,000 tonnes of coffee a year. The ruins of those early estates are protected by UNESCO as the Archaeological Landscape of the First Coffee Plantations in the South-East of Cuba, a World Heritage Site since 2000.

The industry declined after the revolution and the nationalisation of coffee farming. In 2011 the BBC reported that the previous harvest had been the lowest on record, that most coffee drunk in Cuba was now imported, and that the state was returning to blending roasted peas into the subsidised ration coffee — a mix first used in the 1980s. So the "Cuban coffee" poured in Miami is a style rather than an origin: dark, strong, sweet and shared.

For other coffees sweetened with condensed or whipped sugar, see the Vietnamese coffee guide and dalgona coffee.