In this issue: the brewer Costa Ricans actually reach for at home and the cheap cloth that makes it worth copying; who picks that coffee; where Colombia's earthquake damage assessment has moved to; the grind experiment that ends the case for pre-ground; and the two French press habits worth unlearning.
Part One covered why Costa Rican coffee looks the way it does, and Part Two covered how to read the grade, region and varietal on the bag. This one is about what happens after you get it home, because the everyday Costa Rican brewer is not a V60 and it is not a machine.
It is the chorreador: a wooden stand, often painted, holding a cotton sock called a bolsita stretched over a wire ring. Coffee goes in the cloth, hot water goes through it, and the cup sits underneath. Ana Valencia's write-up for Perfect Daily Grind gives the numbers Costa Rican baristas actually use — a 1:15 to 1:16 ratio, a medium grind about the same as any manual pour-over, water at 92 to 97°C, and three to three and a half minutes start to finish. The one technique note that is not obvious is agitation: Fabiola Solano, vice president of Costa Rica's bartenders and baristas association, stirs slowly and constantly through the drawdown so the bed does not cake up the sides of the bag.
What makes it worth trying is the filter rather than the ritual. Cloth sits between paper and metal — it holds back more sediment than a mesh basket but lets through the lipids that paper strips out, so the cup comes out sweeter and rounder than a V60 of the same coffee without the silt of a French press. It is also close to free, which makes it the cheapest way to actually taste what filtration does rather than read about it. There is more on that trade further down this issue.
The catch is hygiene, and it is a real one. Heyner Varela of Choco Café in Monteverde describes the discipline plainly: clean it after every use, then boil it, rinse it and store it in the fridge at the end of the day. A neglected bolsita goes rancid and sours everything you brew through it, and even a well-kept one lasts about a month.
Costa Rica's harvest runs November to March, which puts the peak-freshness window on shelves January through June. Reading this in late August you are well outside it, so buy on the roast date rather than on a harvest claim.
A public statement coordinated by the University of Costa Rica's Kioscos Socioambientales programme and released on 21 July, with more than 500 signatories including academics and former presidents, is pressing the government over conditions for Ngäbe-Buglé migrant pickers. It rests on a February internal report by the Judicial Investigation Agency's Los Santos unit recording 19 deaths of Ngäbe-Buglé minors between January 2020 and February 2026, ten of them from bronchopneumonia; for scale, 14,400 migrant pickers entered for the season and 39,608 received temporary social-security coverage in the 2025–26 harvest.
The magnitude 7.4 earthquake that struck western Colombia on 10 August has killed at least 312 people and injured more than 4,600, with 290 still missing as of 19 August. On the coffee side the export halt has eased — Buenaventura reopened to heavy cargo on 12 August and exporters have been rerouting through Caribbean ports — while the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros is now assessing on-farm damage to drying facilities, water systems and equipment across Risaralda, Valle del Cauca, Caldas, Antioquia, Chocó and Quindío, with no sector-wide figure published yet.
ICE-certified arabica inventories have fallen to 231,445 bags, described as a 2.75-year low, on a Brazilian harvest running behind last year's pace and the Colombian disruption above. Front-month arabica traded at $3.24 a pound on 20 August, down 1.2% on the day after a run-up earlier in the week — and since futures reach retail shelves with a long lag, this is the market pricing the bags that land in autumn, not the one you opened this morning.
Whole-bean sales grew 3% in the US over the past year and much faster across Europe — 20% in the UK, 31.2% in Germany, 33% in Italy, 35% in France — according to Financial Times figures relayed by Barista Magazine in late July, alongside NCA data putting 85% of past-day coffee drinkers brewing at home, the highest share since 2012. Higher prices are pushing people toward beans rather than away from coffee, which quietly makes the grinder the decision rather than the accessory.
Don Iszatt brewed the same Colombian coffee through a V60 at three grind settings and measured what moved: extraction yield fell from 21% at an espresso grind to 18.8% at filter and 15% at French press, while flow rate rose from 0.9 to 1.5 grams per second. Same coffee, same brewer, same water — which is about as clean an argument as you will find against one bag of pre-ground doing duty across methods.
Three moves, none of which cost anything: steep considerably longer than the usual four minutes, break the crust and skim it off rather than stirring it back in, and then lower the plunger only to the surface of the liquid instead of pressing it to the bottom. The last one is the counter-intuitive part, because driving the filter down through the bed is exactly what pushes fines into the cup.
If the chorreador above got your attention, this is the wider map: Ana Paula Rosas walks the four paperless routes — French press, moka pot, cloth and stainless mesh — and is straight about the trade rather than selling the eco angle, since paper strips lipids and polyphenols for a cleaner, lighter cup while reusable filters let them through for heavier body and more sediment. Keep the caveat from the American Heart Association's July statement in Circulation alongside it: those same retained oils carry cafestol and raise LDL cholesterol, so going paperless is a taste-and-waste decision rather than a health upgrade.
A JAMA cohort study published in February followed 131,821 people for a median of 36.8 years and recorded 11,033 dementia cases, with the highest coffee-consumption quartile showing 141 cases per 100,000 person-years against 330 in the lowest, a hazard ratio of 0.82. The association sits at two to three caffeinated cups a day and decaf showed no equivalent relationship, which points at caffeine rather than coffee's other compounds — though this is an observational cohort, so it is an association and not a cause.
The 2026 final runs on Sunday 6 December at Frontón Bucareli in Colonia Centro, the first Mexican final in the competition's 18 seasons, with twelve roasters pouring more than 30 coffees in a Roasters Village alongside the competition itself. Tickets are 265 MXN early-bird and 350 MXN general admission from 1 October, and the organisers are explicit that it is for anyone who simply enjoys a good cup rather than for professionals only.
Two things this week cost nothing but attention: stop pressing the plunger to the bottom, and stop asking one grind setting to serve three brewers. The chorreador costs a little more, a cloth, and is still the cheapest experiment on the list. If any of it was useful, forward this issue to a coffee-obsessed friend or send them the sign-up page. See you next Thursday.
Thanks for reading ☕