A piccolo, or piccolo latte, is Australia’s small milk coffee: a single ristretto shot topped up with steamed milk in a little glass. It gets compared to the cortado all the time. Both are short drinks served in glass, and both keep the coffee up front. They’re built differently, though, and the piccolo is the milkier of the two.
How a Piccolo Is Made
The base is a ristretto, a short, concentrated shot of about 20 ml (under an ounce), pulled with the same dose of coffee as an espresso but less water. It tastes sweeter and heavier than a full shot. The barista pours it into a small glass of about 100 ml and fills the rest with steamed milk, textured the way you’d texture it for a latte, with a thin layer of microfoam on top. Some cafés use a double ristretto. The single is the traditional build.
That puts the ratio at about one part coffee to three or four parts milk. A cortado is closer to one to one. Put simply, the piccolo is a very small latte, and the cortado is espresso with the milk turned down.
Where It Came From
Nobody can point to the first piccolo. The story most Australian baristas tell is that it began as a working tool in Sydney. Baristas had to taste their coffee with milk all day to check how a blend was running, and drinking a full latte each time was far too much milk. A ristretto with a little steamed milk in a small glass gave them the taste without the volume, and from there it drifted onto menus. Melbourne, as with most things coffee, says it got there first.
The name is Italian for small. The drink itself is Australian through and through. Italian migrants opened espresso bars in Melbourne and Sydney in the 1950s, and Australian baristas have been reworking Italian coffee ever since.
Piccolo or Cortado?
Order a piccolo if you like a latte’s texture but not its size. The microfoam makes it rounder and smoother, and the ristretto keeps it sweet. Order a cortado if you want the coffee’s edges left on, with less milk and almost no foam.
Both make a good test of a café. There’s so little milk to hide behind that a tired shot shows up in the first sip.