What is the difference between Piccolo coffee and milk espresso for lattes? Why is Piccolo Latte called a mini latte?

Yesterday, a friend discussed the Coffee combo with Qianjie while buying beans at Qianjie Store. He found that most of the milk coffees in Combo on the market are actually closer to piccolo, or piccolo, in terms of cup size and ingredient ratio. So he thought that the cup of milk coffee in the combination should be renamed Piccolo instead of calling it a latte.

Indeed, milk coffee in most Combo is closer to Piccolo. However, there is nothing wrong with calling it a latte, because Piccolo coffee is also known as "mini latte", which can be interpreted as a small cup of latte.

Why is Piccolo coffee called a "mini latte"? Piccolo coffee originated in Australia. As introduced in Front Street, it is a small cup of milk coffee. The origin of the name "Piccolo" comes from the original name "Piccolo latte". In English,"Piccolo" means "piccolo" in musical instruments, so when we adopted the English meaning to translate the name of this cup of coffee, it is "Piccolo", which is fully called "Piccolo Latte."

However, in Italian,"Piccolo" means "small", so when we use the Italian meaning to translate the name of this cup of coffee,"Piccolo Latte" means-"small latte." The reason why this cup of coffee was named "Piccolo latte" is easy to understand because it is usually only half the size of a latte, both in terms of cup size and materials used. Interestingly, this cup of coffee was originally born just to save the cost of debugging coffee. As we all know, whether you are a roaster or a barista, if you want to verify whether a bean or a concentrate is suitable for making milk coffee, the easiest way is to directly make a cup of milk coffee and judge whether it is qualified by tasting it. As the most widely received espresso coffee, latte naturally becomes the standard for production and measurement. So this is why the barista makes an extra cup of latte in addition to tasting the taste of espresso in daily morning, in order to measure the compatibility of the concentrate with milk.

But if you debug more samples, it will be wasteful to make a full cup of latte. Why? Because the cup size of lattes is very large, one cup is usually 200 - 300ml. For many people, this kind of coffee can be filled in one cup. Then when we debug more samples and have fewer measuring personnel, there is a high probability that we will not be able to drink all of the lattes we make. At most, we will drink two or three sips from one cup, and the rest will be basically poured out. Such an approach would obviously waste a lot of materials and spend a lot of unnecessary costs, so some people thought of using only a single concentration and then making a mini version of the latte in the same proportion as the regular latte. This way will not cost too much unnecessary costs, nor will it cause too much waste.

Qian Street believes that this is an idea that many baristas will think of. But the difference is that this practice has been pushed to the table by Australian baristas. Because the small cup size is not easy to fill, and the price is beautiful, such small cup size lattes are very popular in Australia. In order to distinguish it from regular latte, Australian baristas named it "Piccolo Latte" based on its characteristics, meaning that it is a small cup of latte.

As Qianjie has been sharing before, domestic cafes rarely produce Piccolo coffee alone. Because the production of Piccolo coffee only uses a single espresso, the current mainstream of domestic coffee production is to directly extract double espresso coffee, using more powder to extract less concentrate, for example, using 18g of powder to extract 36ml of concentrate at a powder-to-liquid ratio of 1:2. It is rare to use a single concentrated powder bowl or extract a single espresso separately. The purpose of this production is not only to give the coffee a stronger taste and taste, but also to make the product more stable. Because a single-serving concentrated powder bowl can easily create channels, which affects the taste of coffee. So Qian Jie mentioned it in a previous article, which is why many cafes in China would rather use double flour bowls to extract one extra portion of concentrate than use a single flour bowl to extract coffee.

Since Piccolo coffee only uses a single espresso, if double powder bowls are used to extract double espresso, it means that the other half of the espresso will face the risk of being thrown away and wasted, so there are few cafes choose to produce Piccolo separately. Yes, but not much. So if you want to make a delicious cup of Piccolo coffee, Qianjie will also recommend extracting two espresso liquor and dividing half to make it. Although it is also popular to extract Ristretto instead of a single portion of concentration to use it as the base for piccolo, the taste to be good requires conditioning and grinding on the original basis, which will be more troublesome. Take Qianjie as an example. The espresso beans used to make espresso coffee on Qianjie are the classic Italian blend of Qianjie in the Qianjie bean list. The coffee produced by it will have rich oil and strong chocolate., nut, caramel flavor, very mellow taste, very suitable for making Italian milk coffee such as latte, Piccolo, and Australian white. When using this bean to make espresso based on Piccolo, the amount of powder used in Qianjie was 18g, the powder-to-liquid ratio was 1:2, and the extraction time was 30 seconds.

When the espresso coffee is extracted, we divide it in half, and then pour the right amount of milk in a ratio of 1:5. If you have to stir the milk foam, you can also make a simple pull flower, so that a cup of "mini latte"/Piccolo coffee is finished ~ very simple ~

Since the production method is exactly the same as that of latte, the only difference lies in the cup size and the amount of materials. Therefore, this cup of piccolo tastes exactly the same as that of latte. It tastes smooth and mellow, with a strong and sweet taste. It has butter cookies, caramel, and chocolate flavors, which are very good ~

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