Shaken Espresso: The Italian Shakerato and the Brown Sugar Oat Milk Version

Shaken espresso is hot espresso shaken hard with ice and a little syrup until it is cold and frothy. To make one, put large ice cubes and a teaspoon or two of syrup in a cocktail shaker, pour in a freshly pulled double espresso, shake hard for 15–20 seconds, and strain it into a glass — into a chilled cocktail glass on its own, as Italians drink it, or over ice with a splash of milk.

The shaking is the whole point. In those few seconds it chills the coffee, dissolves the sweetener and whips the espresso into a fine foam that a stirred iced coffee never has.

Two ways to serve it

The Italian caffè shakerato. A double espresso shaken with ice and a little simple syrup or sugar, then strained into a chilled martini or cocktail glass — with no ice in the glass and no milk. It is a fixture of Italian cafés in summer.

The café-chain shaken espresso. The shaken coffee, ice and all, poured into a tall glass and topped with milk. The best-known version is Starbucks' Iced Brown Sugar Oatmilk Shaken Espresso, which went on the menu in March 2021: Blonde espresso shaken with brown sugar and cinnamon, topped with oat milk. It launched alongside the national roll-out of Oatly oat milk at most US Starbucks stores.

The recipes

For a shakerato:

1. Chill a martini or cocktail glass in the freezer.
2. Fill a shaker about half full with large ice cubes and add the syrup.
3. Pull a double espresso and pour it in while it is still hot.
4. Shake hard for 15–20 seconds, until the outside of the shaker is frosted.
5. Strain into the chilled glass, leaving the ice behind. A fine, pale foam should sit on top.

For the brown sugar oat milk version, shake the espresso with a tablespoon of brown sugar syrup and a pinch of cinnamon in the same way, pour everything — ice included — into a tall glass, and top with about 120 ml of cold oat milk. To make the syrup, dissolve dark brown sugar in an equal amount of hot water; the coffee syrups guide has the method and how long it keeps.

What the shaking does

It chills the coffee — at a price

Ice cools coffee by melting, and melting takes energy: about 334 joules for every gram of ice. Water, and espresso is mostly water, gives up about 4.18 joules per gram for every degree it cools. So a 36 g double shot landing at about 70 °C releases roughly 36 × 4.18 × 70 ≈ 10.5 kJ on its way to freezing — enough to melt at most about 31 g of ice.

That sets the strength of the drink. Even fully chilled, a shaken double is roughly half espresso and half meltwater: about 3.6 g of dissolved coffee in some 67 g of liquid, or around 5% — several times stronger than filter coffee at 1.15–1.35%. Once the coffee is near freezing, shaking longer mostly melts more ice, with the extra heat coming from the shaker, the air and your hands.

Use large ice cubes, not crushed ice. Smaller pieces have far more surface area, so they melt faster and dilute the coffee more during the shake.

It makes the foam

The fine foam on a shakerato is espresso foam, beaten up by the shaking. Coffee carries its own foam stabilisers: in their review of espresso foam, Illy and Navarini identified proteins, polysaccharides and melanoidins — the brown compounds formed during roasting — as the components that hold coffee bubbles together, with lipids working against them. Shaking hot espresso with ice whips air into it as it cools, and those compounds coat the bubbles.

Sugar helps. Dissolved sugar thickens the liquid between the bubbles, slowing the drainage that makes any foam collapse, so a lightly sweetened shakerato keeps its head longer than an unsweetened one. Use syrup, or add granulated sugar to the hot espresso before it meets the ice: once the coffee is cold, sugar barely dissolves.

Shaken, blended or poured

Several iced espresso drinks look alike but are made differently:

The Greek freddo espresso is the shakerato's closest relative: the food writer Daniel Young compares the two directly, though a freddo is whipped in a powerful drinks mixer and served over ice.

Where the shakerato came from

No one knows exactly who first shook an espresso with ice. Wikipedia's account attributes the drink to Italian bartenders in the 1990s, who borrowed the vigorous shaking of aperitivo cocktails and applied it to coffee. The word itself is a piece of Italian borrowing: the English verb shake with the Italian past-participle ending -ato, "shaken". It first appeared in Italian print in 1966, describing a shaken cocktail rather than coffee.

Variations

• Shakerato corretto — a dash of amaretto, sambuca, grappa or Irish cream in the shaker.
• Shakerato al cioccolato — a little cocoa stirred into the hot espresso before shaking.
• Shakerato con panna — topped with a spoonful of whipped cream.
• Without a shaker — a jam jar half full of ice works; hold it in a tea towel, because it gets very cold.

Caffeine

Ice, syrup and milk add no caffeine. At the USDA's average of 212 mg per 100 g of restaurant espresso, a 36 g double carries about 76 mg and a triple about 115 mg, though café shots vary widely. The caffeine guide compares other drinks.