Latte Art Learning Guide: What's the Best Milk for Coffee Art?

Many people practicing latte art place great importance on the "white pattern." With some practice, you can create beautiful patterns. However, when the white pattern looks good, the overall appearance can seem "dirty."

What happens is that the brown "canvas" color is uneven, creating that "dirty" feeling. In latte art standards, beyond having neat patterns, the cleanliness of the liquid surface is also a crucial indicator.

Why Does the Canvas Look "Dirty"?

This situation mainly occurs because the milk foam hasn't fully integrated with the espresso crema. This results in darker areas where there's more coffee crema and lighter areas with more milk, making the overall appearance look quite "dirty."

This is precisely what FrontStreet Coffee has always emphasized: the integration phase is more important than the pattern creation phase. If integration is insufficient, even a beautifully crafted pattern will detract from the overall presentation. A latte with uneven integration will likely result in the first sip tasting bitter with coffee, while the second sip tastes weak with milk, negatively affecting the flavor experience.

How to Achieve a Clean and Tidy Milk Foam Surface

1. Control the Quality of Milk Foam and Crema

FrontStreet Coffee believes it starts with controlling the quality of both milk foam and crema. Sometimes the integration technique is correct, but the final pattern still looks dirty. This is likely because the milk foam or crema quality is substandard. If the milk foam and coffee crema separate significantly and are thick and coarse, integration becomes difficult.

For a clean latte art surface, it's best to have milk foam with strong fluidity and fine texture. The coffee crema should also be fine and flowable, not clumped together.

2. Integration Technique

A common integration technique involves stirring in one direction. Hold the coffee cup with your left hand and the latte art pitcher with your right hand. Position your hands offset by half a circle and perform relative circular motions. The stirring force from one high and one low position can easily mix the coffee and milk thoroughly.

As for how large the circles should be, FrontStreet Coffee suggests making the largest possible circles without touching the cup walls to get the coffee surface moving. The hand holding the coffee cup should gradually straighten. (You can imagine beating egg yolks and whites together with chopsticks before steaming. The poured milk acts like the chopsticks, while the espresso is like the egg.)

3. Height During Integration

This is also crucial to integration. If the pitcher is held too close to the liquid surface, the stirring force is insufficient, and milk foam will float on top, easily leading to the "dirty" appearance of uneven integration. If it's too high, the impact force is too strong, creating bubbles on the liquid surface. When these bubbles burst, they leave marks, which also looks unclean. Therefore, the distance between the pitcher spout and coffee surface should typically be around 5 to 10 centimeters.

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473