A cortado is a shot of espresso cut with about the same amount of warm milk. That’s the drink. It comes in a small glass or cup, usually around 4 ounces (120 ml or so), and it tastes of coffee first and milk second.
The name is Spanish. Cortar means to cut, and cortado means cut: the milk cuts the espresso, softening its acidity and bitterness without burying it. In Spain it’s as ordinary as a café con leche, ordered at bar counters all over the country, in the morning and again after lunch.
The Milk Is the Point
Two things set a cortado apart from other small milk drinks. One is the ratio. Specialty cafés treat it as one to one: a double shot, then about the same volume of milk. The other is texture. The milk is steamed until it’s warm, but it isn’t whipped into foam, so there’s no dome of froth and rarely any latte art worth photographing. You get a thin pale layer on top and a drink that stays dense all the way down.
That’s what separates it from the Italian milk drinks. A cappuccino is built on foam and a latte on a big pour of silky milk. The cortado keeps its milk flat and small, and the espresso still leads.
In Spain itself the ratio is looser. Plenty of bars pour a splash of milk into a single espresso and call it a cortado, and nobody complains. The one-to-one glass is closer to what specialty cafés abroad settled on. Both count. Order a cortado in Madrid and another in Brooklyn and you’ll get two slightly different drinks.
How Big, How Hot
In a specialty café, a cortado holds a double shot, about 2 ounces (60 ml) of espresso, plus roughly 2 ounces of milk. It fits a 4.5-ounce glass with a little room to spare. The milk is warm rather than hot, around 55 to 60°C (130 to 140°F), so you can drink it straight away. Most people do, in a few sips, often standing up.
From Insider Order to Starbucks Menu
Outside Spain, the cortado spent years as an insider’s order, the drink you asked for when you knew your way around a specialty menu. Then Starbucks added a Cortado to its US menu in January 2025. Its version uses three ristretto shots of Blonde espresso with steamed milk in a short, 8-ounce cup, which makes it bigger and milkier than a Spanish cortado. The idea survives the upsizing: more coffee than a latte, less fuss than a cappuccino. Capsule brands have noticed too; Nescafé Dolce Gusto sells a cortado capsule in Europe.
The Cortado Around the World
The drink travels, and it changes names on the way. In San Francisco it became the Gibraltar, named after the glass it’s served in. In Miami it’s the cortadito, made with sugared Cuban espresso and often evaporated milk. Portugal has its own ladder of small milk coffees, from the pingado up to the galão. In Buenos Aires the cortado is the everyday order, with the lágrima for people who want mostly milk. And Australia’s piccolo sits close by, though it carries more milk and more foam.
Start with the plain one, a double shot and the same again in warm milk. Everything else on this site is a variation on it.