Freddo Espresso

A freddo espresso is a double shot of espresso shaken or blended with ice until it is cold and topped with a fine, light-brown foam, then poured over fresh ice into a tall glass. The name borrows the Italian word freddo (“cold”), but the drink is Greek through and through. Shaking whips the coffee’s oils into a velvety head, so it tastes smoother and less sharp than espresso simply poured over ice.

In Greece it is the default iced coffee from spring to autumn. Cafés use the same metal mixer, the frapiéra, that made the older frappé famous, and Greeks sit over one glass for an hour or more with friends. The industry estimates that the freddo espresso and its milky sibling, the freddo cappuccino, together make up roughly 70–80% of all cold coffee drunk in the country.

Sugar matters: you say how sweet you want it when you order, because sugar added to an ice-cold drink afterwards won’t dissolve. Many people drink it skétos (unsweetened) to taste the coffee itself.

Greece already had a national iced coffee, the frappé, which spread from Thessaloniki in the late 1950s. As espresso became fashionable in Greek cafés, the idea took hold of applying the frappé’s shaking technique to espresso, and the freddo espresso appeared in the 1990s. It became a nationwide habit in the 2000s and has since largely overtaken the frappé.

Its exact origins are unclear. The invention is most often credited to Yiannis Iosifides, founder of the coffee distributor Kafea Terra (which brought illy to Greece in 1988), who reportedly wanted to stop espresso sales falling every summer. Another story points to a café called Freddo in Athens. Greek chains such as Coffee Island have since taken the drink abroad.