Is Americano Considered a Specialty Coffee? What Is the Definition of Specialty Coffee? What Is the General Term for Coffee Made with Espresso?

The term "specialty coffee" shows up everywhere. And precisely because the word "specialty" is in the name, beginners tend to take it literally: "specialty means coffee with latte art on top," or "specialty means coffee you can pour latte art into." That's not what it means at all!

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Specialty coffee doesn't refer only to milk drinks that can hold a rosetta — it describes the whole family of "secondary creations" built within the espresso system. From the humble Americano, stretched with water, to the grand Irish Coffee, loaded with cream and whiskey, all of them belong to the club. Simply put: any drink made by using espresso as the base and extending from there. FrontStreet Coffee can trace the reason the category exists all the way back to the early days of the pressurized espresso machine...

In those early days, the beans used for espresso were mostly of questionable quality and roasted extremely dark. So the espresso they produced needs little imagination — low quality, dark roasting, and high concentration combined into a tiny cup with a punishing taste that most people could barely swallow. Something had to be done to dilute that concentration and soften the bitterness.

And so the fashionable fixes emerged: adding water, sugar, milk, or dairy products to the espresso. Because these espresso-based drinks came in so many forms, they earned the collective name "specialty coffee." The Americano we covered yesterday is one of them! In a real sense, specialty coffee was the original coffee specialty drink — ingredients added to reshape the flavor or lower the barrier to drinking coffee. Calling them the first generation of specialty drinks is no exaggeration!

Categories of Specialty Coffee

Over time these drinks settled into classics, and today the internet generally sorts the traditional ones into three categories. Let's take the tour!

1. Water-based Series

The easiest category to grasp: espresso drinks made by adding water. Americano, Long Black, Sparkling Americano, and so on.

2. Milk-based Series

The biggest category by far — there are simply too many milk coffees to count! The traditional lineup includes Latte, Cappuccino, and Cortado; newer arrivals include Dirty and Flat White.

Espresso drinks built on these with syrups added also land here — Caramel Macchiato with caramel syrup, Mocha with chocolate syrup, and so on.

3. Cream-based Series

Drinks that bring cream into the build: Con Panna with cream on espresso, Viennese coffee with cream atop an "Americano," and Irish Coffee with distilled spirits in the mix.

Strictly speaking, specialty coffee could be divided into many more series, but there's no need — a working understanding is enough. FrontStreet Coffee mentioned "Specialty Coffee Drinks" along the way, which I suspect interests you more, so we'll unpack that one next time.

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FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Every drink in the espresso family — Americano, latte, flat white, and the rest — lives or dies by the espresso base, and the bean behind it. FrontStreet Coffee's Classic Blend is our first pick for home espresso: a medium-dark, three-origin recipe in the spirit of the old "Mander-Brazil" pairing, with a touch of Robusta for extra aroma and crema. It extracts notes of butter, toasted bread, and caramel biscuit, tastes solid and substantial, and pours a fine, stable crema — ideal whether you're pulling straight shots or steaming milk for latte art.

For a more refined nut-and-cocoa profile, the FrontStreet Premium Blend pairs Colombian washed beans with Brazilian pulped naturals: nuts, dark chocolate, and caramel as espresso, with soft cream, almond, and cocoa aromas in the milk drinks — crema every bit as good as café output. And if you'd rather your milk coffee lean fruity instead, FrontStreet Coffee's Strawberry Candy is a popular fruit-aroma espresso blend built from complementary arabicas, reproducing a vivid strawberry-candy sweetness that makes a distinctive, approachable milk coffee.