Café de Olla: Mexico's Clay Pot Coffee

Café de olla is coffee simmered in a clay pot with piloncillo, unrefined Mexican cane sugar, and a stick of canela. It is sweet, spiced and unmistakable, and unlike almost every other brewing method the sweetener is part of the brew rather than something stirred in afterwards.

The olla is doing something, not just looking traditional

An olla de barro is unglazed earthenware. It is porous, it heats slowly and evenly, and it holds the temperature steadily once it gets there, which is what a long simmer wants. Over time it absorbs coffee and seasons, the way a moka pot does, and Mexican households will tell you an old olla makes better coffee than a new one.

A new pot should be soaked in water for several hours before its first use, or it will crack over heat and taste of dust. You can make the drink in a steel pan and it is still good; it is simply not the same drink.

Piloncillo is not just sugar

Piloncillo is whole cane juice boiled down and set in a cone, with nothing refined out of it. It keeps the molasses, so it carries a smoky, faintly mineral depth that white sugar does not. Substituting demerara gets you closer than caster sugar; substituting white sugar gets you sweet coffee rather than café de olla.

The canela matters too. Mexican cinnamon is true cinnamon, softer and more floral than the cassia sold as cinnamon in most of Europe and North America, which is harsher and more medicinal. If yours tastes aggressive, that is probably the reason.

How it is made

Water, piloncillo and a cinnamon stick go into the olla and are heated until the sugar dissolves. Coarsely ground coffee goes in, the pot comes just to the edge of a boil and is pulled off, and it steeps for about five minutes before being strained into cups.

The grind should be coarse, as for a French press, because the contact time is long and the coffee sits in the water. What coarse ground coffee is for covers why the grind has to match the contact time. Boiling it hard is the common mistake and produces something harsh.

Which coffee to use

A medium-dark or dark roast, and not an expensive one. The sugar and the spice will cover any delicacy you pay for, so a subtle washed Ethiopian is wasted here in exactly the way it is wasted in a latte. Mexican beans are the traditional and appropriate choice, and the coffees we have reviewed can be filtered by roast level.

Some households add orange peel, star anise or clove. All are traditional somewhere, and the spice register is the through-line.

How it differs from the other spiced coffees

Several traditions put spice in the pot rather than in the cup and they are not the same thing. Arabic qahwa uses cardamom, is barely sweetened and is pale and tea-like. Turkish coffee is sweetened at brewing but not usually spiced, and it is unfiltered so the grounds settle in the cup. Vietnamese ca phe sua da uses condensed milk rather than a spiced syrup.

Cafe de olla is distinct in combining all three moves: sweetener, spice and brewing vessel are one decision made before the water is hot, and it is strained rather than left to settle.

Where it comes from

The usual account places it in the Mexican Revolution, made by the soldaderas who travelled with and supplied the armies: cheap coffee, sweetened hard with piloncillo and spiced, brewed in a pot over a fire for a lot of people at once. Whether or not that origin is exact, the shape of the drink fits it, and it is still a drink made in quantity rather than by the cup.

It survives as a home and market drink rather than a café one, which is part of why it stayed itself while so much else was standardised.