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Where have all the cappuccinos gone?

Matt Holden

Is the 1/3 coffee, 1/3 milk, 1/3 foam ratio on the way out?
Is the 1/3 coffee, 1/3 milk, 1/3 foam ratio on the way out?George Fetting

What has happened to the cappuccino? Reader Melanie Vanheer writes in an email: "While we have wonderful coffee across our city, it seems this has come at the cost of the art of the cappuccino. Wherever I go I get a coffee more akin to a latte or flat white, sometimes with a dusting of cocoa. Where has the 1/3 coffee, 1/3 milk, 1/3 foam ratio gone? Do the barista training courses neglect to properly train their students in the craft of creating the various styles?"

With Starbucks reportedly dropping the cappuccino from its US menus and adding the flat white, and the World Barista Championships replacing the cappuccino with a "milk drink course" from next year, we all might wonder.

Melissa Caia​, who runs the William Angliss Institute's Coffee Academy, agrees that a cappuccino should have more foam: "We say two centimetres for a cappuccino, one centimetre for a caffe latte, and minimal foam on a flat white."

But, she says, "the style of milk has changed from that frothy bubble bath to a creamy, textured, silky foam that blends better with espresso. We're teaching that it's all about silk, not air."

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World Barista Championship judge Craig Dickson of Veneziano Coffee says: "In competition, a cappuccino is 30 millilitres of espresso blended with milk in a 150-millilitre to 180-millilitre cup, served without chocolate. We're looking for at least one centimetre of microfoam, and you'll see judges pushing the foam back from the edge of the cup with a spoon to measure it. I have seem some old chain-store training material that suggests the third-third-third ratio, but it has never been part of the WBC rules."

James Hoffmann​, in The World Atlas of Coffee, traces the rule of thirds to a 1950s book that describes cappuccino as "an espresso mixed with equal amounts of milk and foam". As he points out, this is ambiguous: does "equal amounts" refer to just milk and foam, or coffee, milk and foam?

The Italian National Espresso Institute's guidelines (yes, that's a thing) say cappuccino should be made with 25 millilitres of espresso and 100 millilitres of milk, "steam-foamed" until its volume increases to 125 millilitres. The foam "discloses its remarkable body through an inviting sensation of cream and of high spherical perception", which I guess means a dome of microfoam, not a mountain of froth.

The rule of thirds would mean 50 millilitres of espresso in a standard cup – a double shot, which is not a cappuccino. But Melanie Vanheer has a point: a cappuccino should have more foam than a caffe latte, and disguising a flat white with a dusting of chocolate is definitely out of order.

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