Café Frappé — tasting notes & food pairings

Café Frappé

The café frappé, in its modern café sense, is a blended iced-coffee drink: coffee — usually espresso or strong brewed coffee — is combined with milk, ice and sugar or flavoured syrup and whizzed in a blender until it becomes a thick, cold, slushy drink, often finished with whipped cream and a sauce drizzle. The blending crushes the ice into a smooth, frozen-slush texture and aerates the coffee and milk into a pale, creamy, dessert-like beverage that is sipped through a fat straw. This is the coffeehouse-chain style of frappé familiar from the United States and much of the world, closer to a milkshake than to a plain iced coffee, and it is distinct from the shaken Greek frappé, which is instant coffee, water and ice whipped to a foam and never blended.

SweetNon-alcoholic

A blended café frappé reads first as sweet, cold and creamy — soft roasted coffee wrapped in milk and sugar syrup, with caramel and vanilla notes and, in mocha versions, cocoa — carried on a thick, slushy, milkshake-like body from the crushed ice. The coffee itself is mild and rounded rather than sharp, diluted and aerated by blending, so bitterness is low and the overall impression is that of a frozen coffee dessert. Topped with whipped cream and a sauce drizzle it turns richer and sweeter still; it is far creamier, sweeter and colder-bodied than a plain iced coffee, closer to a coffee milkshake.