Call it an einspänner, cold foam, or a cream top. | Getty Images/iStockphoto
Why einspänners are everywhere
The einspänner is a Viennese drink that’s named after a horse-drawn carriage. As the lore goes, carriage drivers wanted to insulate their hot coffees and prevent spillage as they drove, thus they topped their drinks with thick, dense layers of whipped cream. As with horse-drawn carriages, the hot part of the drink has dropped off. Now, the einspänner is generally made with ice and finished with a layer of frothed, sweetened cream, or a combination of milk and cream. Today, it’s everywhere.
According to Google Trends, the einspänner has seen its highest search interest ever, in both the United States and globally, in the past two years; most of that growth has happened since late 2023, and much of it has come from South Korea. This is because as much as the einspänner is a product of Vienna, it’s also become synonymous with Seoul’s ascendant coffee culture, with some TikTok videos referring to einspänner drinks as “Korean-style.”
With the country’s huge cultural influence right now, its beverage trends are also being replicated around the world. In a piece for Eater LA, Cathy Park reported on the Korean influence on the city’s coffee scene, referencing the Seoul-inspired Damo Tea House. There, the einspänner is not limited to coffee: Iced coffees and matcha lattes alike also come with fluffy, flavored cream. Across the city, similar drinks appear at Maru, Memorylook, La La Land Kind Cafe, and the viral, celebrity-loved Community Goods; these hits then inspire copycat recipes online.
The cream that tops these drinks is not whipped cream in the way one generally envisions whipped cream on coffee, as in snowy-peaked peppermint mochas. That cream is an airy swirl that’s shot through the tip of a canister. This cream is softer, denser, and usually spooned or poured onto a drink. The textural goal isn’t peaks that hold, nor is it the liquidy microfoam of a latte, which is made with heat. Instead, it’s what Eric Kim calls for in his einspänner recipe: whipped just until it hits the consistency of “melted ice cream: silky, light and pourable.”
Even if you don’t know them as einspänners, these kinds of frothy, foamy drinks have taken over. Tohm Ifergan, the founder and CEO of the coffee company Dayglow, says that beyond the einspänner, the category can be known by a few names: “You’ll hear einspänner or cream top or cold foam, and they’re almost all identical.” They appear at Starbucks and at specialty shops, and their influence is even trickling into stores; the oat-creamer brand Sown recently launched a product billed as “cold foaming cream,” though it’s really just sweetened oat milk that one froths at home.
Cream-top drinks now make up most of the specialty menu at Dayglow’s coffee shops in Los Angeles and New York — a transition that happened gradually, Ifergan notes. The Totoro, the most popular drink, is a black sesame and orange blossom coffee with a coconut-based cream top. The topping adds body and offers a layer on which salt or other garnishes can sit. “It also balances the high sweetness of the liquid because it’s coming through the less-sweet fat,” Ifergan says. “You get a little bit of the density in that luxurious sip, and then the liquid seeps through.”
Drinks like these are best sipped, not stirred or sucked. Consider, for example, the Larry’s Ice-Green at Larry’s Cà Phê in Brooklyn. It’s a cup of iced coconut water that’s topped with a non-dairy frothed matcha foam, then sprinkled with shreds of dried coconut. A sip leaves you with a kiss of green fluff, before the cool water cuts through it. The effect would be lost with a straw, the foam and the liquid becoming indistinguishable.
Just a few blocks away, the Asian coffee shop Land to Sea offers similarly plush pillows of seasonally changing foams — black sesame, longan, pandan — that can be added to any iced drink.
Not every fluffy-topped beverage cites the einspänner, whether one attributes it to Austria or Korea, as inspiration. The frothed drinks at Larry’s Cà Phê draw on Vietnamese coffee culture, which is also gaining popularity globally. Anchoring the shop’s coffee menu are the cà phê muối, made with cold brew and salted foam topping, and the cà phê trứng, finished with egg custard. The foam gives the drinks a dessert-like vibe.
And of course, when drinks do double-duty as video and photoshoot stars, these fluffy toppings also contribute to their visual appeal, says Tuan Nguyen, the owner of Larry’s. “A lot of people get a drink by visuals first, so I want to make sure that it is presentable,” he says.
Part of the interest in the einspänner and other similar drinks certainly has to do with Starbucks, which made “cold foam” a certified thing. First joining the menu on a temporary basis in 2014, cold foam in its many flavors is now an in-demand part of the permanent menu, finishing so many drinks that it inspires frequent gripes from the company’s baristas. Accordingly, cold foam is a crucial element of what the New York Times’s Priya Krishna has identified as a growing culture of hyper-customized beverages; through modifications and additions, a drink becomes the orderer’s own as opposed to a boring, common option.
Consider the category a modern version of the Frappuccino. In those drinks, “whipped cream was such a prevalent ingredient or topping,” Ifergan says. “I think the idea of cold foam or cream is essentially just an evolution of that kind of beverage.” If whipped cream on a drink is decidedly middle school, cold foam is fitting for adulthood: a little heavier, but similarly sweet.
