5 MOST COMMON Latte Art MISTAKES(and fixing them)

I am a firm believer that anyone can pour latte art. Yes, anyone, including yourself. But today I wanted to show you five things that you're very likely doing in your latte art that's holding you just that one step back. And if you do all of these in conjunction with one another, I'm very confident that you will see an improvement in your latte art. Number one, integrating too much. Integration, or pre-mixing, is just that little bit of milk that we add at the beginning prior to pouring the design. This helps establish a new consistency in the milk and allows the pitcher to get closer to the coffee sooner. If you integrate less, your pour will have more space and more time to fill the cup, and you could end up with a larger and fuller design. If you integrate much more before the pour, nice rhyme, you'll see a smaller design due to less room in the cup from the amount of milk you've added. And having more milk in the cup prior to the design will make the flow of milk a bit more stiff because there's more foam present. Integration and how heavy you pour with the pitcher will directly determine the size of the design in the end. I usually integrate just about an ounce in my little six-ounce cup, though that would be dependent on the cup size you are using. The next mistake you're for sure making is not preserving the crema. An easy way to fix this is to stack your cups. Stacking your cups keeps more of that crema on top by lessening how much breaks up from the height of the spouts. Having more crema is by no means a necessity, but it does add a deeper contrast to the pours and it'll make your latte art pop. Let's take these pours for example. Both of these are great pours, but the one with the crema just kind of hits a bit harder. It also tends to glide a little bit better when there is a nice fresh crema on top, though that is not always true for all coffees. In the case of dark roasts or robusta, you might actually see a crema that is too thick and inhibits your ability to pour. In that case, I would end up pulling the shot in one vessel and then transferring it into the cup I'm gonna pour into. This will help break up some of that crema and basically do the opposite of what we would do otherwise. Next up, not swirling the milk enough. Foam is full of air and less dense than milk, so when you're finished steaming your milk, it's constantly fighting against you to rise up in that pitcher. We can refer to this as separation, and to prevent that separation, we're gonna swirl our milk, but you're probably not swirling enough. If you don't swirl enough, instead of getting that clear defined image, you'll just end up with a big foam turd on your cup. Look familiar? So just before you're about to pour, that's another good rhyme, I want you to swirl the milk in the pitcher vigorously against the sides until it becomes thin and there's no dome of foam, another good rhyme, on top of the milk. Next mistake, you're rippling too fast. Rippling is the swinging of milk in the pitcher side to side, and if you're holding the pitcher too loose or you move your hand side to side with the pitcher, that wave will not form. And it's common for folks to try to ripple quickly and sporadically, this unfortunately doesn't produce the best latte art, so to correct this, instead of violently wiggling the pitcher, aim to make the waves wider. If you're gripping firm and the wave is wider, then the swinging will become more consistent. This is similar to when you're pushing someone on a swing. If you push someone with more force, they swing up for longer and more consistently as the wave or swing dies down. If you push someone rapidly, well, they would die. ♪ In the arms of an angel ♪ Not tilting enough. This is by far the biggest thing that people make a mistake on. Not tilting the cup enough is going to limit how close the spout can get to the surface, giving your design a beige beginning and very little control over the flow of milk. However, if you were to tilt the cup to the point where the liquid is almost spilling out, you will notice an immediate improvement on the contrast and consistency in the color of your pours. The other culprit is having too much liquid in the pitcher when we pour. It's important to have the liquid line coming from the spout to be as close to level with the cup as possible. Anything higher will prematurely spill out when you attempt to get close to the surface. You will, again, see beige. And also, this is wasteful, so don't have all that extra milk in there to begin with. This is another reason why I'm a big proponent on steaming milk in a small pitcher and transferring it to a larger pitcher. If you have a smaller amount of milk in a larger pitcher, when it's standing right up, it ends up being a shorter amount in the vessel. And when it's tilted to the side, it elongates that milk, making that liquid level closer to what you have in the cup. And this is gonna give you a lot more control when you're trying to flow in Latte Art. If you wanna hear more about my theory on using a bigger pitcher with a smaller amount of milk, make sure to click this video right here. It's actually the first video I ever made on YouTube, and it's all ready for you. I really like it, and it goes over the entire philosophy. But I'll see you guys next time. Cheers, you dirty scumbags.