200-Year Ritual · Cloth-Sock Pour-Over
Café Chorreado
📷 Closely related photo — Photo: Axxis10 / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
The filter is a cloth bag shaped like a sock, hung from a wooden stand — a brewing method Costa Ricans have used for roughly two centuries, long before paper filters existed.
Café chorreado is brewed by pouring hot water over ground coffee held in a cotton cloth filter called a bolsita or 'coffee sock,' which drips directly into a cup or pot below. The wooden stand-and-cloth setup, called a chorreador, is still used in homes and traditional sodas (diners) across Costa Rica for the daily café de la tarde.
Why it's made this way: Coffee built much of Costa Rica's modern economy, and the chorreador method has stayed the traditional home-brewing standard even as the country became known internationally for coffee export quality.
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Part of World of Street Food — 690 dishes from 118 countries.
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