Peruvian Esencia de Café

Esencia de café (“coffee essence”) is a traditional way of making coffee in Peru, and in Ecuador too: a very strong concentrate, dripped slowly through ground coffee and kept to hand, so that each person makes their own cup by adding hot water or hot milk. The classic brewer is the cafetera de la abuela, “grandmother’s coffeemaker”, also called gota a gota, “drop by drop”. The National Catholic Register describes the result as thick, dark and up to four times stronger than ordinary drip coffee. Here’s how it works and how it’s served.

The short version

• A strong coffee essence, made by slow drip.
• Brewed in a two-part drip pot: water above, coffee in a basket, essence below.
• Diluted in the cup with hot water (black) or hot milk (café con leche).
• Everyone chooses their own strength.
• Peru and Ecuador, where it’s also called tintura.

How does a cafetera de la abuela work?

The pot has two parts. According to the National Catholic Register, you pour hot water into an upper chamber, and it trickles slowly down through a basket of ground coffee, then through a filter into the pot below. Because the water passes so slowly through a generous amount of coffee, what collects is not ordinary coffee but an essence: thick, dark and very strong.

It works on the same principle as other gravity drip pots, such as the Neapolitan flip pot or the French drip pots of the 19th century: water above, coffee in the middle, a pot below, and no pump or pressure.

How do you make esencia de café?

1. Fill the basket with ground coffee. Use far more than you would for a normal pot: the aim is a concentrate.
2. Pour hot water into the top chamber and let it drip through, slowly, drop by drop.
3. Collect the essence in the pot below.
4. Serve it in a small jug or cruet, with a separate jug of hot water or hot milk.
5. Dilute to taste in each cup.

The sources I found don’t give fixed quantities. Since the essence is about four times the strength of drip coffee, I’d start with around four times your usual dose for the same amount of water, and a medium-fine grind, so the slow drip has plenty to extract.

How is it served?

In Peru, the custom is to pass the essence and the hot water round the table. “That’s our custom here,” Eduard Montoya Altamirano, owner of the Trébol restaurant in Chiclayo, told the National Catholic Register. “We pass around the coffee and water, and you can add whatever you want.” More water, weaker coffee; less water, stronger.

One of his regulars was Robert Prevost, bishop of Chiclayo from 2015 to 2023 and now Pope Leo XIV. Montoya says the bishop took his coffee strong, and “only with water”, never milk. The restaurant used beans from San Ignacio, Cajamarca, in Peru’s northern highlands.

In Ecuador, the essence often arrives as a cruet of dark liquid, “like black balsamic vinegar”, next to a cup of hot milk. A writer living there was told that Ecuadorians call the essence tintura, and a coffee made with hot water and tintura is una tinta. It’s offered in many traditional places in historic Quito, and restaurants make the essence in different ways, including with a stovetop moka pot.

Is esencia de café still made today?

Yes, and it’s still evolving. In 2026, the Peruvian news site El Búho reported on the chupeco, a dark, intense essence made with coffee from the Peruvian jungle in a new brewer called the Mupeco, invented by Rolando Ruiz in Huánuco. Ruiz runs workshops from Chanchamayo and hopes to make the chupeco an internationally recognised Peruvian way to drink coffee.

General guidance only. The essence is strong, so dilute it well if you’re watching your caffeine, and take care with hot water.

Esencia de café vs other methods

• Liquid coffee concentrate: bottled coffee extracts, from Camp Coffee to New Orleans drip.
• Colombian tinto and olleta: Colombia’s everyday pot coffee.
• Costa Rican chorreador: coffee dripped through a cloth bag on a wooden stand.
• Cold brew concentrate: a strong coffee made to dilute, but brewed cold.

Explore every gravity and metal-filter method in the gravity-metal chapter.