Colombian Tinto & Olleta

Tinto is Colombia’s everyday coffee: a small black coffee, usually sweet, drunk all day, at home, in cafés and from the thermos flasks of street vendors, often in small 4 oz cups. The traditional way to make it is in an olleta, an aluminium pot used especially for hot drinks: water is brought to the boil, often with panela, raw cane sugar, dissolved in it, the coffee is boiled for a while, and the grounds are left to sink before it’s poured off. Here’s how it’s done.

The short version

• An olleta, an aluminium pot for hot drinks.
• Water brought to the boil, often with panela dissolved in it.
• Coffee boiled, then rested off the heat a few minutes.
• Grounds left to sink, then poured off, or strained.
• Served small and black, often sweet.

How do you make tinto in an olleta, step by step?

1. Bring the water to the boil in the olleta, dissolving panela in it if you like.
2. Stir in the ground coffee.
3. Let it boil, for about a minute in one recipe, then take it off the heat and leave it for 3 to 4 minutes.
4. Leave it until the grounds sink.
5. Pour it off carefully, or strain it through a cloth or sieve, into small cups.

Brew mode on this page times the steep for you.

How much coffee should I use?

Recipes vary a lot. At the Immigrant’s Table uses 2 tablespoons of coffee to 2 cups of water, boiled for 45–60 seconds and then left for 3 to 4 minutes. Publix’s batch recipe uses 1 cup of medium-fine coffee and 8 oz of panela to 12 cups of water, steeped off the heat for 3 to 4 minutes and strained. If you use panela, add it to taste: it’s very sweet. Flavors of Bogotá adds that spices such as cinnamon or ginger sometimes go in too.

What is panela?

Panela is unrefined whole cane sugar, sold in hard blocks or cones. Dissolved in hot water, it makes agua de panela, a drink in its own right, and brewing coffee in it makes a sweet, rounded tinto with a hint of molasses.

Pour off or strain?

Both are traditional. The simplest way is to let the grounds settle and pour carefully, leaving them behind. Many recipes strain the coffee instead, through a cloth filter, like a colador, or a fine-mesh sieve. In cafés and public places, Flavors of Bogotá notes, a cloth filter is usually part of making it.

Tinto vs other pot coffee

	Colombian tinto	Café de olla	Cowboy coffee
Country	Colombia	Mexico	American West
Pot	Olleta	Clay pot	Any pot
Sweetener	Often panela	Piloncillo, with cinnamon	Usually none
Serving	Small, black	In a clay mug	In a mug

General guidance only. Take care with boiling water and the hot olleta, and let the grounds settle before pouring.

Tinto vs other methods

• Colador: the cloth coffee sock used across Latin America.
• Chorreador: Costa Rica’s cloth filter on a stand.
• Coador de pano: Brazil’s cloth filter for sweet cafezinho.
• Cowboy coffee: boiled coffee poured off the grounds.

Explore every boiled method in the boiled chapter.