← Back to globe
Traditional Brew · Cloth-Sock Pour-Over

Café Chorreado

Café Chorreado — street food from Costa Rica
📷 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 simple wooden stand, and it is rinsed and reused over and over rather than thrown away.

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.
Read it in context →

More from Costa Rica

Chifrijo Ceviche (Costarricense) 🥟 Patí Tamal Asado 🥯 Rosquillas Guanacastecas Chicha
Part of World of Street Food — 3443 dishes from 118 countries. Something wrong here? Tell us in the comments below. Photo credits.