Around 1660, Dutch ambassador Johan Nieuhof, stationed in China, is credited as the first person to deliberately experiment with adding milk to coffee, then a bitter, medicinal-seeming drink. Milk’s casein proteins bind coffee’s tannins, its fat coats the tongue, and its lactose adds sweetness. Europe built a family of drinks on that reaction: the French cafe au lait, Italian caffe latte, Spanish cafe con leche, German Milchkaffee, and Polish kawa biala. A latte runs one part espresso to three to five parts steamed milk, while a traditional macchiato draws espresso directly into foamed milk to preserve the crema. Portugal adds the galao and the half-and-half meia de leite, and Madeira calls a large milky coffee a chinesa.

Other cultures played with density and sweetness. Israel’s cafe hafuch layers milk under espresso, and Valencia’s cafe bombon settles condensed milk beneath espresso until the drinker stirs it. Southeast Asia adapted condensed milk to local brewed coffee, Indonesia and Brunei serve unfiltered kopi susu and wait for the grounds to sink, and Vietnam’s central highlands, source of about 70 percent of the world’s Robusta, tame the bean with egg yolk coffee. Vienna argues over what a Wiener Melange is, New England orders a regular, and the flat white spread from New Zealand to London and then to Starbucks.

• The Canary Islands’ cafe proprio pairs condensed milk with a bitter espresso lungo to cut the sugar.
• Julius Meinl defines a Wiener Melange with espresso, while Cafe Sperl uses half brewed black coffee and half milk.
• A New England regular means coffee with three creams and three sugars.
• The flat white’s integrated microfoam was perfected in New Zealand in the late 1980s and carried to London cafes like Department of Coffee and Social Affairs.
• Starbucks introduced the flat white to the United States and Canada on January 6, 2015.