How to Make an Americano: Ratio, Order and How Strong It Really Is

An americano is espresso diluted with hot water, usually about 1 part espresso to 3 or 4 parts water. To make one, pull a double espresso — about 36 g from 18 g of coffee — into a warmed cup and top it up with around 150 ml of hot water, then add a little more if it tastes too intense.

The drink exists to turn espresso into something you can sip for a while. It is also one of the easiest drinks to get right, because once the shot is good, the only variable left is how much water you add.

The recipe

1. Heat the water. Anywhere from about 80 °C to just off the boil works; the section on temperature below explains the trade-off.
2. Warm the cup, then pull a double espresso into it. The espresso dial-in guide covers getting the shot right.
3. Top up with about 150 ml of hot water and taste. Add more water if it is too strong; next time, use less if it tastes thin.

Wikipedia's summary of the drink gives the usual proportions as 1:3 to 1:4, which in practice means roughly 120–180 ml of water for each shot. The strength depends on nothing else: more shots or less water make it stronger, more water makes it weaker.

The long black: water first

In Australia and New Zealand the same ingredients make a long black, built the other way round. Pour about 100–120 ml of hot water into the cup first, then pull a double espresso straight onto it. Breville's version uses about two parts water to one part espresso.

The order matters for the crema. Pouring water onto a shot breaks up the foam on top; pouring the shot onto water lets the crema settle on the surface more or less intact. Both drinks keep some crema, but in a long black it is more pronounced. The smaller amount of water also makes a long black the stronger of the two.

Which is better is a matter of taste. A long black looks more like espresso and its first sips taste more intense; an americano is more uniform from top to bottom.

How strong an americano really is

Coffee strength is measured as total dissolved solids: the share of the drink, by weight, that is dissolved coffee. Espresso is typically 6–12%; filter coffee about 1.15–1.35%. Run the numbers for a double shot holding about 3.6 g of dissolved coffee (36 g at 10%):

So the typical americano, at 1:3 to 1:4, is noticeably stronger than a filter coffee. To bring a double down to filter strength, you need about 250 ml of water — roughly a 1:7 ratio. If your americano tastes harsher than the drip coffee you are used to, it is probably just stronger, and more water will fix it.

Per cup, though, the caffeine is not always higher. Water adds no caffeine, so an americano has exactly the caffeine of its espresso. At the USDA's average of 212 mg per 100 g of restaurant espresso, a 36 g double holds about 76 mg, while a 240 ml mug of brewed coffee at 40 mg per 100 g holds about 95 mg. Café doubles are often larger and stronger than that average, so treat the comparison as rough. The caffeine guide has the wider picture.

Why an americano is not a lungo

There are two ways to make a long black coffee from an espresso machine. An americano dilutes a normal shot with water after brewing. A lungo — Italian for long — pushes more water through the coffee itself.

They do not taste the same, and research on extraction explains why. In a 2013 comparison of nine brewing methods in European Food Research and Technology, longer extractions such as the lungo put more of each compound into the cup than espressos did, because more water through the coffee extracts more efficiently. Tasters linked higher concentrations of caffeine and chlorogenic acids to more bitterness and astringency. A lungo keeps extracting after the sweet, fast-dissolving compounds are gone, so it pulls in more of the slow, bitter ones.

An americano avoids that. The shot stops at its normal length, and the water added afterwards changes how strong the drink is, not what was extracted. That is why a good americano tastes like a stretched espresso, and an over-long lungo tastes like a bitter one.

Getting the temperature right

The temperature of the water decides how soon you can drink the cup. Say the shot lands at about 70 °C, and treat water and coffee as having roughly the same heat capacity:

• With 150 ml of water at 95 °C, the drink starts near 90 °C — too hot to sip for a few minutes.
• With 150 ml at 80 °C, it starts near 78 °C.

If you want to drink your americano straight away, let the kettle rest for a minute or two first.

Americano and cholesterol

Espresso is not paper-filtered, so it carries some cafestol, an oily compound that raises LDL cholesterol. In a 1995 Dutch study, Italian espresso held about 1.5 mg of cafestol per cup, against 3.5 mg for French press and 3.9 mg for Turkish coffee; drip-filtered coffee held negligible amounts, because the paper holds the oils back. An americano made with a double shot may therefore carry around 3 mg, close to a cup of French press. For most people that is a small factor; if you are managing high cholesterol, the coffee and cholesterol guide explains when switching to filter coffee is worth it.

The iced americano

For an iced americano, pull the espresso over a glass of ice and top it up with cold water — about 120 ml for a double, less if the ice is already melting. In South Korea it is close to a national drink: it has a nickname, "ah-ah", and its devoted fans are called eoljuka, from a phrase meaning "even if I freeze to death, iced Americano!" The iced coffee guide covers other ways to make coffee cold.

Where the name came from

Americano simply means American. You will often read that American soldiers in Italy during the Second World War watered down espresso to make it more like the coffee they knew, but that story is unproven. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the term to Central American Spanish, where café americano was a derisive name for weak coffee in the mid-1950s, and its first known use in English was in a Jamaican newspaper in 1964. In Italy, caffè americano can mean either espresso with hot water or filter coffee, which is more precisely caffè all'americana. In 2025, after talk of annexing Canada, some Canadian cafés began listing the drink as a "canadiano".

For every other drink on the board, see the types of coffee drinks guide.