As the weather turns cooler, a cup of hot latte that warms your hands and carries a sweet aroma has once again become the daily first choice for many people. But many friends always run into the same problem when recreating it at home: the latte they make either has bitterness that steals the show, or has too much milk flavor that suppresses the coffee aroma until it disappears, making it hard to achieve the balanced, fragrant, and sweet taste of a café. In fact, a delicious hot latte is not just espresso and milk simply mixed together. Bean selection, milk choice, extraction, and ratio all directly affect the final flavor. This article will start from two dimensions, material selection and production process, and sort out the key ideas for making a balanced, fragrant, and rich hot latte at home, including the roast level and blending direction of coffee beans suitable for milk coffee, the logic of pairing milk with beans, reference formulas for espresso extraction, and methods for adjusting the ratio of milk to coffee, to help you find your own golden recipe at home.

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As soon as the weather turns cooler, a hot latte becomes the cup many people keep thinking about. Holding a warm, sweet coffee in the cold wind is indeed hard to refuse. It is also for this reason that more and more friends have started making hot lattes at home. Recently, Front Street has received quite a few questions in the background about making lattes.

In these inquiries, most people mention the same trouble: the latte they make always tastes a little off and cannot reach the fragrant, sweet feeling of café-quality drinks. Sometimes the coffee's bitterness is too prominent, and sometimes the milk flavor is too heavy and covers up the coffee's own flavor. So today, Front Street will talk about how to make a cup of hot latte that is balanced in taste, fragrant, and sweet.

I. Material Selection

"Latte" is simply milk plus espresso, but if you want to achieve latte's mellow, fragrant, and not bitter characteristics, you still need to put in some thought. Many people fail at making lattes because they put all their attention on the "assembly" of materials and instead overlook material selection. In fact, whether the materials are chosen correctly is just as key as your technique. Whether a dish tastes good is not determined only by the cooking process.

For coffee, the choice of beans directly determines the flavor direction of the entire cup. Therefore, if you want to make a delicious hot latte, the first step is to choose a suitable coffee bean.

A latte contains a large amount of milk to balance the coffee flavor, so the roast level of the coffee beans is fairly strict. If the beans are roasted too light, the reactions produced during roasting are not sufficient, and the extracted coffee flavor is easily overwhelmed by the milk. In addition, red flowers also need green leaves to set them off, and the sweetness of a latte likewise needs a bit of bitterness to support it. So when choosing beans for milk coffee, Front Street suggests prioritizing medium-dark roast or dark roast coffee beans. These beans have a more obvious roasted aroma and can stand up against the milk.

From extraction experience, Front Street Coffee recommends prioritizing espresso blend beans with higher stability. Blends usually combine flavor profiles from different origins, and after medium or darker roasting, they are more likely to extract rich crema (beans with good crema performance are more suitable for milk coffee). In this way, the espresso has a thick, rich mouthfeel and a higher margin for error.

Moreover, most espresso blend beans themselves are supplied for café use. Compared with single-origin beans of similar flavor, their price is often lower, following an economical and cost-effective route. For beginners with little production experience, if you want to make a delicious latte, using espresso blend beans is clearly more worry-free. Recommended are Front Street Classic Blend Coffee, Front Street Commercial Blend Coffee, and the espresso moka pot coffee beans recommended by many baristas — Front Street Black Cocoa Blend Coffee.

Friends who like drinking lattes can first choose Front Street Specialty Blend Coffee. It combines Brazil and Colombia, two major coffee-producing regions, and its medium-dark roast profile makes it mainly suitable for extraction with espresso machines and moka pots. Made into an iced latte, it has the flavors of cream, chocolate, cocoa milk, caramel, and nuts at the same time.

Milk is the other "lead" in a latte besides espresso. In a cup of latte, milk accounts for as much as 80%, so choosing milk is equally crucial. However, unlike coffee beans, milk should be chosen according to the taste of the coffee beans you use. Whole milk is the primary choice; that goes without saying. What really needs to be chosen is the one among many whole milks that best suits the current beans.

Milk produced by different manufacturers has its own advantages. Some has higher sweetness, some has a thicker mouthfeel and stronger milk flavor... But these advantages are not suitable for all coffees. When the milk does not match the current beans, the coffee will not only fail to improve, but may even go the opposite way. Even if both the beans and the milk are of good quality, the combination may still not taste good.

For example: if you use a medium-dark roast coffee bean, the extracted coffee has a prominent flavor and tastes mellow and full overall. If you then pair it with a milk that is also strong in flavor and high in body, the latte you make will taste so thick and heavy because both sides are too strong and too rich that it becomes a bit cloying. So this type of bean needs to be paired with a milk that is not so heavy in mouthfeel and has relatively high sweetness.

Therefore, finding a milk that matches the taste of the beans is very important. For milk types, everyone can refer to this article "Milk Review" and use the brands and milk values as reference. As for mouthfeel and taste, it is recommended that everyone buy and try them yourself. After all, the comparison in the article is based on "Front Street Warm Sun Blend."

II. Production

Now that materials have been covered, next is production. Espresso is the base of a cup of latte, and first of all its balance of sourness, sweetness, and bitterness must be ensured. This may be a bit hard to understand, but simply put, it means a cup of espresso that is neither sharply sour nor burnt bitter, and tastes very concentrated but acceptable. To achieve this, you need to find a suitable extraction formula.

Generally, Front Street rather recommends using the golden formula circulated online as the initial adjustment target, for example, using 18–20 g of grounds and extracting twice the weight of the grounds in 25–30 seconds (light roast beans can take a little longer). Then fine-tune according to the taste of the coffee. If you do not know how to adjust it, friends can move on to this article to learn "How to Adjust Espresso."

After the espresso is adjusted, what remains is to heat the milk. The milk can have milk foam or not. After all, for home coffee, the presence of milk foam is not that important. If you do not want too much trouble, simply heat the milk to the range of 60°C–68°C to activate the sweetness of lactose. If you want the coffee to have a finer, denser mouthfeel, you can choose to steam milk foam. However, steaming milk foam is more complicated, so you can move on to this article for a detailed explanation, "Detailed Guide to Steaming Milk Foam." (You can steam it without a coffee machine.)

The last step in making a delicious latte is to find the most suitable ratio between milk and coffee. What mainly needs adjusting is the amount of milk. After all, the espresso is already extracted in a fixed amount, and compared with adjusting extraction, adjusting the amount of milk is obviously more convenient.

But Front Street does not recommend that everyone directly copy other people's data ratios, because the coffee beans and milk used by each person are different. Even if they are the same, each person's taste preferences and concentration preferences are different, and a latte that others find delicious may not suit you. So it is still best to adjust according to your own taste.

Usually latte coffee has a rough ratio range, which is 1:4–1:8. Adjustment simply means the difference between a little more milk and a little less milk. If you think the milk flavor is too strong, add less milk; if you think the coffee flavor is too strong or a bit bitter, add more milk. When you think that at a certain ratio this cup of latte tastes outstanding and fits your taste very well — then congratulations, this ratio is the golden ratio suitable for you, your beans, and your milk. You have successfully made a cup of latte that best matches your own taste and best suits your available materials.

The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.