What is a breve?

A breve (pronounced breh-vey) is an espresso based drink made with steamed half-and-half — a light cream. It resembles a small latte but made with cream instead of milk.

A typical breve is made with 60ml of espresso and 60ml of half-and-half. In coffee shops, particularly Starbucks, "breve" has become a prefix you can use to customize any order — replacing the milk with half-and-half.

What is half-and-half?

In much of the world half-and-half refers to various alcoholic drinks containing a mixture of two drinks. But in the United States, the only country you can typically order a breve, it refers to a mixture of half milk and half cream.

Origins of the breve

It's hard to work out when people started using the word breve to mean espresso with half-and-half — but people have been putting cream in their coffee since cream and coffee existed. We found a reference to heavy cream being put in coffee in 1924¹ and the first reference we can find for half-and-half in coffee is from 1963.²

The first usage we can find of the term "breve" directly referencing coffee with steamed half-and-half comes from a 1990 article about Tony's Coffee House in Bellingham, Washington.³

While we don't know exactly where the term comes from it is likely that it was adopted during the late 80s as a way of marketing Italian style coffee to Americans. Around the same time Breve became a popular term, other Italian words grew in popularity to describe coffee — particularly by Starbucks, e.g. venti and grande.

Breve means short or brief in Italian. So it makes sense as a description for a drink made of cream. Cream is too rich to drink in large quantities. This makes it all the more ridiculous that you can now order a Venti breve cappuccino at Starbucks — 20oz of cream with a shot of espresso. Yikes.