How to Make a Flat White: Ristretto, Thin Microfoam and a Small Cup

A flat white is a double shot of espresso, usually a ristretto, with about 130 ml of steamed milk and a thin, glossy layer of microfoam around 5 mm deep, served in a small cup of 150–180 ml. To make one, pull the shot into a warmed cup, steam cold milk with so little air that it barely grows, and pour it low and steady so the crema stays on the surface.

Those numbers are what make it a different drink from a latte rather than a smaller one. Less milk, less air and a more concentrated shot all push in the same direction: towards a cup that tastes first of coffee.

The recipe

1. Warm the cup. A small drink loses heat quickly to a cold cup.
2. Pull a double ristretto straight into it. Grind a little finer than usual or stop the shot early, aiming for about 30 g of liquid from 18 g of coffee.
3. Steam the milk with as little air as possible. Let the tip sit just under the surface for only a moment — a brief, quiet hiss — then sink it slightly so the milk spins. The volume should barely rise.
4. Stop at 60–65 °C, when the jug is too hot to hold for more than a second or two. Wipe and purge the wand, tap the jug once and swirl until the milk is glossy, with no visible bubbles.
5. Pour within about 20 seconds, from close to the surface, in a steady stream. The crema should stay on top and the surface finish flat, with a thin white layer or a simple pattern.

The amounts come from two places. In The Coffee Book, the coffee writer Anette Moldvaer describes a flat white as a double espresso with about 130 ml of steamed milk and a 5 mm layer of microfoam. Arla Foods' barista guide gives the shot as a double ristretto of 30–40 g of liquid from 14–20 g of ground coffee, a cup of 150–180 ml, and a finishing temperature of 60–65 °C — and asks that the milk meet the espresso within 20 seconds of steaming, before it has time to degrade.

What makes it a flat white

Less milk in a smaller cup

Strength in coffee is measured as total dissolved solids: the share of the drink, by weight, that is dissolved coffee. Take a double shot holding about 3.6 g of dissolved coffee — 36 g at 10% — and spread it through different amounts of milk:

• In a flat white with about 130 ml of milk, it makes up roughly 2.1% of the drink.
• In a 350 ml café latte with about 250 ml of milk, it is roughly 1.2%.

That makes the flat white about 70% more concentrated, sip for sip. Against a small, traditional 225 ml latte the gap is narrower, and that is where the second difference comes in. Tourism New Zealand's description, quoted on Wikipedia, makes the same point: a flat white should hold the same quantity of extracted coffee as any other drink on the menu, but in a 175 ml vessel rather than the latte's 225 ml, so it tastes stronger.

Less air in the milk

How much air you let into the milk at the start decides the drink. Arla's guide suggests aerating milk until it grows by about two-thirds for a cappuccino and about a third for a latte, while the thinnest foam, as in some flat whites, comes from growing it by only about a quarter. The result is milk that is silky all the way through, with a skin of foam on top rather than a cap.

Thin foam changes how the drink is tasted. With a cappuccino your first sips are mostly froth; with a flat white you reach the coffee immediately. As the historian Garritt Van Dyk puts it, without the thicker foam of a latte or cappuccino, the flat white delivers a stronger coffee flavour with a unified creamy texture. Alan Preston, the Sydney café owner most associated with the drink, says a properly made flat white leaves "tide marks" down the inside of the cup as it is drunk.

The name itself records this. In January 1985, according to Wikipedia, the cafeteria at Parliament House in Canberra put up a sign reading "flat white only" during a seasonal problem with the milk that stopped it from frothing.

A shorter, denser shot

A ristretto — Italian for restricted — uses the same amount of coffee as a normal shot with roughly half the water. Because the water passes through for a shorter run, the shot captures more of the fast-dissolving compounds and fewer of the slow ones that arrive late and taste bitter.

Research on extraction explains the trade-off. A 2013 comparison of nine brewing methods in European Food Research and Technology found that short espresso-style extractions were more concentrated than long ones, but that the longer extractions put more of each compound into the cup in total, because more water extracts more efficiently. Caffeine and chlorogenic acid concentrations tracked bitterness and astringency in the tasting panel. A ristretto is therefore dense but incomplete: diluted into milk it tends to taste less bitter, with a more intense espresso character, and it carries slightly less caffeine than a full shot of the same coffee.

You do not need a ristretto to make a good flat white. A well-extracted double works. But because the flat white has so little milk to hide behind, the shot is exposed, and a short, sweet one shows well. The espresso dial-in guide explains how to adjust grind and yield.

How to pour it

Pour from close to the surface rather than from a height. A high pour drives the milk under the crema and mixes everything into a uniform brown; a low pour lets the milk's thin layer of foam settle across the top while the crema still shows around it. Move the jug slowly and evenly, and if you want a pattern, keep it simple — a small heart or a few tight leaves suit a thin layer of foam. The latte guide describes the two stages of the pour in more detail.

Caffeine and calories

Milk adds no caffeine, so a flat white has exactly what its shot has. At the USDA's average of 212 mg per 100 g of espresso, a 36 g double holds about 75 mg; a ristretto from the same coffee holds a little less, and cafés vary widely. The caffeine guide compares other drinks.

Almost all the energy is in the milk. At the USDA's 61 kcal per 100 g of whole milk, 130 ml comes to about 80 kcal; with skimmed milk at 34 kcal per 100 g it is about 45 kcal. Those 130 ml also bring about 6 g of sugar, all of it lactose.

When it goes wrong

Where it came from

The flat white grew up in the espresso bars of Australia and New Zealand, and both countries claim it. The best-documented case is Alan Preston's: his Moors Espresso Bar in Sydney put a flat white on its menu in 1985. Preston says he brought the drink from far north Queensland, where, in a 2024 article for The Conversation, Van Dyk describes cafés in the sugar towns catering to wealthy Italian cane growers. Their menus offered two black coffees and three white ones — the cappuccino, the Vienna and the "flat" — and Preston renamed the last one the flat white.

The name is older than any of those cafés, though. A character orders a flat white in an espresso bar in the 1963 British film Danger by My Side, the coffee historian Ian Bersten thinks the drink probably originated in England in the 1950s, and a Sydney review in May 1983 had already praised a café's "flat white coffee". New Zealand's claims, from Auckland and Wellington, are covered in the latte vs cappuccino vs flat white guide.

By 2005 the drink had reached the UK, and Starbucks added it to its American menu on 6 January 2015. In 2024, The Economist reported that one in three consumers in the UK chose a flat white, and that Pret a Manger had sold eight million in a year, close to its nine million cappuccinos.

Australia has kept refining the idea. Van Dyk notes that the Melbourne "magic" is a double ristretto with textured milk in a 148 ml cup — an even stronger flat white in an even smaller cup. For every other drink on the board, see the types of coffee drinks guide.