What's the Difference Between Pre-Infusion and Stirring Infusion in Coffee Latte Art? Beginner Tips for Latte Art!

Just like the blooming process in pour-over coffee, there's also an important preparatory step similar to blooming in the process of coffee latte art! What is it?

That's right—it's integration! So-called integration (in latte art) refers to using a portion of milk to mix with coffee in advance before officially creating the latte art pattern. Its purpose is to allow milk and coffee to blend more thoroughly, maintaining consistent texture while raising the liquid surface to facilitate latte art. Although it may seem simple, we must never underestimate this integration step, because the quality of integration will directly affect the overall quality of the coffee.

High-quality integration allows latte art patterns to appear neater and more beautiful, while maintaining consistent coffee texture—every sip offers a balanced experience where coffee and milk complement each other perfectly. However, if the integration quality is poor, it will result in a cluttered pattern background or layered textures! As FrontStreet Coffee often mentions, you might first taste the bitterness of espresso crema, followed by the flavor of coffee and milk.

Importance of Integration Methods

Because of this, for all milk coffees that require latte art or foam, controlling the quality of integration is crucial. The best way to improve integration quality is naturally through diligent practice, achieving high-quality integration by improving skill proficiency. Besides that, in different situations, we can also reduce the difficulty of achieving perfect integration by choosing appropriate integration methods. That's right! There are different integration methods, and this is the integration technique that all baristas use: selecting different integration methods according to different situations. This is what FrontStreet Coffee wants to share today! Different integration methods have their own advantages, and by using them flexibly, you can maximize their value to achieve perfect integration.

Stirring Integration

First, FrontStreet Coffee will introduce the most classic integration method—stirring integration. When beginners first start learning latte art, the integration method they're most likely to encounter first is stirring integration, because it's a very classic and practical method. It not only improves production speed but also creates a liquid surface suitable for making various complex patterns.

Stirring integration is somewhat similar to the circular pouring in pour-over coffee. We pour milk foam into the coffee liquid from a relatively high position using a thin stream. During this process, we continuously circle to stir the coffee liquid, allowing the milk foam to mix evenly with it until the liquid surface rises to our desired height.

The main reason for pouring from a high position with a small stream is to prevent the foam from leaving lines on the surface. By increasing the pouring distance, the milk foam can have more force to penetrate directly into the coffee. Paired with a small stream, it reduces the contact surface with the coffee liquid while allowing more stirring cycles for thorough mixing. Although it sounds simple, you'll find after actual operation that it's somewhat challenging because it heavily depends on the barista's proficiency!

Because while controlling the flow and distance, we also need to continuously circle and stir, requiring both hands to move simultaneously. This often results in either uncontrolled flow distance or flow rate (as shown above), or uncontrolled circling amplitude during integration. The resulting coffee liquid surface has "overgrown" lines, creating a cluttered and unappealing background for the latte art pattern. The coffee's texture is also likely to vary as a result. Therefore, this is a challenging aspect of stirring integration that we must overcome through continuous practice (can be ignored if there are no latte art requirements).

Additionally, stirring integration has a drawback—it's not suitable for taller cups, such as to-go cups.

Because to-go cups are taller, this increases the pouring distance during integration. When the pouring distance is too large, the impact force of the milk will cause it to hit bottom and rebound after pouring, easily leading to whitening of the coffee surface (which makes the surface look more messy). In situations like this, besides carefully performing stirring integration, we can choose another integration method to reduce the difficulty—pre-integration.

Pre-integration

Pre-integration can be described as an integration method that has emerged in recent years. It actually includes the steps of stirring integration, but before stirring integration, we need to use a small amount of milk to pre-mix with the espresso. The specific method is to first pour a small amount of milk into the coffee liquid (equal to or less than the coffee liquid amount), then shake the entire coffee cup to allow the poured milk foam to fully mix with the espresso, followed by starting the stirring integration steps. The advantage of this approach is that it reduces the impact of coffee crema while lowering the difficulty of integration.

What impact does coffee crema have? FrontStreet Coffee has previously shared that the quality of coffee crema affects the difficulty of latte art. Both overly rough and too thin crema will increase the difficulty of coffee latte art. The former is because rough crema tends to clump and layer, phenomena that reduce fluidity during latte art, making it difficult to draw delicate and refined lines; while the latter is because thin crema creates excessive fluidity, causing pattern deviation and irregular patterns during latte art. Besides affecting latte art patterns, both affect the quality of integration. Their occurrence indicates the freshness of the coffee beans—either too fresh or stored for too long. Since FrontStreet Coffee often mentions this, we won't elaborate further here.

In summary, in both these situations, using pre-integration can effectively eliminate the negative effects of poor crema quality. The addition of a small amount of milk reduces the fluidity of the coffee, while the shaking motion can effectively break up crema clumping, increasing the integration between crema and coffee liquid. This allows us to better perform integration and latte art, thereby improving the quality of the coffee.

Similarly, when making latte art in to-go cups, pouring a certain amount of milk along the cup edge in advance raises the liquid surface, reduces the pouring distance, and makes it less likely to experience whitening or messy liquid surfaces during integration.

However, pre-integration also has certain drawbacks. First is that latte art patterns are limited, making it difficult to create overly complex combination patterns. The reason is that the pre-addition of milk foam reduces overall fluidity, while the added integration shaking motion delays the timing of latte art, increasing the separation of milk and foam in the pitcher, further reducing fluidity. Therefore, after using pre-integration, some complex combination patterns are quite difficult to create.

Secondly, because milk and coffee are completely integrated in advance, the liquid surface color will be lighter than with stirring integration, resulting in lower color contrast in the final pattern. You can compare and see~(Please ignore the pattern itself) (Left shows regular stirring integration latte art, right shows latte art using pre-integration)

But regardless of these drawbacks, they don't affect the taste of the coffee, so you can choose your preferred integration method. Or as FrontStreet Coffee mentioned earlier, use them in combination according to different situations~

Important Notice :

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Tel:020 38364473