Café de Olla: Mexican Pot Coffee With Cinnamon and Piloncillo

Café de olla is Mexican coffee made by simmering water with piloncillo — unrefined cane sugar — and a stick of cinnamon, then steeping ground coffee in it and straining. To make about a litre, simmer 1 litre of water with 60 g of piloncillo and a cinnamon stick for five minutes, take it off the heat, stir in 60 g of medium-coarse coffee, cover for five minutes, and strain.

The name means "pot coffee", after the earthenware olla it is traditionally made in. It is drunk especially in cold climates and in the countryside, and it tastes like what it is: strong coffee, sweet and warmly spiced.

The recipe

1. Simmer the sugar and spices. Put the water, piloncillo, cinnamon and any extras in a pot, bring to the boil and simmer for about five minutes, stirring until the piloncillo has dissolved.
2. Take the pot off the heat and stir in the coffee.
3. Steep, covered, for five minutes.
4. Strain through a fine sieve or cloth — or a paper filter, for reasons explained below.
5. Serve hot, in lead-free mugs.

A basic café de olla is just coffee, cinnamon and piloncillo; orange peel, anise and cloves are the common additions.

Why the coffee goes in off the heat

The spices and sugar need simmering: cinnamon bark gives up its flavour slowly, and piloncillo takes a few minutes to dissolve. The coffee does not. Ground coffee steeped in water that has just come off the boil extracts in a few minutes, as it does in a French press, so there is no need to keep it on the flame. Taking the pot off the heat before the coffee goes in gives you the spice of a long simmer with coffee brewed the way any steeped coffee is.

Piloncillo

Piloncillo is the Mexican name for what much of Latin America calls panela: solid sugar made by boiling and evaporating sugarcane juice, without the refining that produces white sugar. In Mexico it is usually sold in small truncated cones, in lighter and darker varieties. It brings sweetness with a molasses depth that suits dark coffee and cinnamon. Dark brown sugar, which is also sucrose with molasses, is the closest substitute.

At 60 g per litre, each 250 ml cup carries about 15 g of sugar — roughly 57 kcal, using the USDA's figures for brown sugar. Traditional versions are often sweeter.

The clay pot, and the lead problem

Wikipedia's summary of the drink says a traditional earthen clay pot is essential because it gives the coffee a special flavour. Any saucepan makes good café de olla, and if you do use clay, it needs care.

Many traditional Mexican clay pots and mugs are finished with lead glazes, and lead leaches from them into food and drink — most of all, as a 2021 report in Mexico News Daily explains, into hot foods, acidic foods and foods stored for long periods. Coffee is hot and mildly acidic. Mexico banned lead in most consumer goods in 1993, but enforcement has been patchy: the report notes that any glazed piece bought in Mexico that is not certified lead-free almost certainly contains lead, that more than half of the pottery produced in the country has dangerous levels, and that the NGO Pure Earth México estimates two in ten Mexican children have toxic blood lead levels from cooking and serving ware.

The safe choices are simple:

• Use a pot and mugs certified lead-free — the Mexican organisation Barro Aprobado certifies lead-free pieces, and Barro Sin Plomo works with potters switching to lead-free glazes — or unglazed pottery.
• Keep decorative glazed pieces for decoration, not for hot coffee.
• When in doubt, brew in a stainless steel or enamel pan and pour into ordinary mugs.

Spices and health

Cinnamon. Most supermarket cinnamon is cassia, which contains coumarin. Germany's Federal Institute for Risk Assessment puts the tolerable daily intake at 0.1 mg of coumarin per kilogram of body weight and says a 60 kg adult reaches it with about 2 g of cassia a day. One cinnamon stick simmered in a litre and shared four ways is a small amount, but if you drink spiced coffee every day, Ceylon cinnamon, which contains very little coumarin, is the safer habit. The pumpkin spice latte guide runs the numbers.

Cafestol. Café de olla is strained, not paper-filtered, so it keeps the coffee oils that paper would trap — including cafestol, which raises LDL cholesterol. In a 1995 Dutch study, boiled, French press and Turkish coffee each carried about 3–4 mg of cafestol per cup, while drip-filtered coffee had negligible amounts. Straining the finished pot through a paper filter removes most of it; the coffee and cholesterol guide explains why that matters for people watching their LDL.

Caffeine

At 60 g of coffee per litre, café de olla is about as strong as ordinary brewed coffee, which the USDA puts at 40 mg of caffeine per 100 g: roughly 100 mg in a 250 ml cup. The spices and sugar add none. The caffeine guide compares other drinks.

For other ways to make coffee in a pan, see the no coffee maker guide; for other spiced coffees, see Arabic coffee and the dirty chai.