Pu’er Coffee

 Step into a small countryside home in Costa Rica and you’ll almost always spot a simple wooden stand hanging on a kitchen wall. In the middle of the stand is a round opening holding a cotton bag with a metal ring, and beneath it sits a coffee cup. This humble setup is the country’s beloved brewing tool: the chorreador — a 200-year-old “old-school treasure” that somehow never went out of style. The structure is almost shockingly simple. No mechanical parts, no fancy gadgets — just a sturdy wooden frame with a circular hole on top. Fixed inside that hole is a cloth filter called a Bolsita (“little bag” in Spanish). The metal ring snaps perfectly into place, allowing the bag to hang naturally. A cup or small serving pot sits right below it. No assembly needed. You just pick it up and start brewing. The brewing process is wonderfully soothing. You scoop in some freshly ground coffee, pour hot water slowly into the dry filter, and watch as the water saturates the grounds. Then, drop...

 Sometimes you might just want a small cup of coffee—maybe for a special blend, or simply to enjoy a few sips without going all in. Every now and then, friends tell me they want to “brew a small cup using just a few grams of beans.” But if you’ve actually tried it, you’ll probably agree: brewing a good cup with a small dose of coffee is much harder than brewing with a regular amount. Just recently, a friend told me he tried making coffee with only 5 grams of beans, but no matter what he did, it just didn’t taste right. The flavor and body were completely different from what he’d get using a normal dose. So, why is it so hard to brew coffee with such a small amount of beans? The short answer: the smaller the dose, the more brewing challenges you’ll run into. Why Small-Dose Brewing Is Tricky In a previous post, I mentioned that each dripper design has its own “sweet spot” for optimal coffee dose. For example, the Hario V60 01 dripper works best with about 10–20 grams of coffee, ...