What is a cortado? The ratio, the glass, and where it's from
Coffee 101Espresso cut with a small amount of warm milk, no foam, in a 4.5oz glass — what actually makes a cortado a cortado, and not a flat white by another name.
The word
"Cortado" is the past participle of the Spanish verb cortar, "to cut" — espresso cut with milk, not milk stretched with espresso. That order of operations is the whole drink: it starts from the shot, and the milk's only job is to take the edge off it.
The ratio
A cortado runs roughly equal parts espresso and steamed milk, about 1:1. The milk is warmed rather than textured into foam the way a cappuccino's is, so what lands in the cup is milk that softens the shot's acidity without diluting the flavor or burying it under microfoam. There's usually a thin skin of foam on top from the steaming, but it's incidental, not the point.
For scale against the rest of the espresso-and-milk menu:
| Drink | Milk ratio | Foam | Typical size |
|---|---|---|---|
| Macchiato | A spoonful | Dollop of foam | ~2 oz |
| Cortado | ~1:1 | Little to none | ~4.5 oz |
| Flat white | ~1:2–1:3 | Thin, velvety microfoam | ~5–6 oz |
| Cappuccino | ~1:1–1:2 | Deep foam cap | ~5–6 oz |
| Latte | ~1:4 or more | Light foam | 8 oz+ |
The glass
Cortados are traditionally served in a small glass tumbler, often called a Gibraltar glass: a 4.5oz glass with a tapered bottom. The name traces to Blue Bottle Coffee in San Francisco, around 2005, where the story goes that the shop accidentally ordered a batch of small glasses meant for beer. Stuck with them, baristas started pulling double shots with just enough steamed milk to fill them, and the name stuck hard enough that plenty of West Coast menus still list "a Gibraltar" rather than a cortado. Some shops now draw a distinction (a Gibraltar as the stronger, double-shot version), but at most counters it's the same drink under two names, sorted out by which glass happened to be in the cupboard twenty years ago.
Where it started, and its siblings
The cortado most likely started in Spain's Basque Country in the late 19th or early 20th century, and spread from there across the Iberian Peninsula into Portugal and, via colonial trade routes, into Latin America. Portugal has its own version, the garoto — Portuguese for "boy," a smaller drink built on the same roughly 50/50 ratio, more common around Lisbon than elsewhere in the country. Cuba's version, the cortadito, adds a distinctly Cuban step: the first drops of espresso get whipped hard with demerara sugar into a caramel-colored foam called espumita before the milk goes in, which is also what separates a cortadito from a plain café Cubano.
In American specialty coffee, the drink took hold in the 2010s, largely through West Coast roasters who'd spent time behind an espresso bar in Spain and brought the ratio home with them. It has held its place on serious espresso menus since, not because it's trendy, but because for a lot of people it's just the correct amount of milk: enough to soften the shot, not so much that you stop tasting it.
If you want to know who actually pours a good one, the city guides on this site are built around exactly that question, one city at a time.