Coffee and Costa Rica

My family may be slightly atypical for Costa Rican culture. The only person who consistently drinks coffee in my house is my tico dad. He has coffee all the time. My tica mom jokes that all my dad does is eat bread and drink coffee. When my mom wakes up in the morning, significantly before everybody else, she automatically puts on a pot of coffee for my dad. Yes, a pot. For just him. Their coffee maker is easily the most fancy kitchen appliance. While the refrigerator is "almost as old as our marriage" and the oven doesn't always cook evenly, the coffee maker is a nice, somewhat expensive American brand coffee maker deluxe. My mom says that the coffee in the morning helps my dad to wake up. When he worked the night shift for many, many years, he would drink coffee before he left so that he would be alert enough to work. My dad claims he is "still recovering" from working nights (years and years ago) and that's why he needs a healthy dose of coffee to wake him up.
When I told my mom that in the US young people do not drink coffee, she was surprised. She said that most people don't like it when they are young, but that they can have it whenever they want. This is different from the US where young people are discouraged from drinking coffee because it is not considered good for them (coffee makes you short, didn't you know?).
My family had difficulty pinpointing certain customs for coffee because it is not as big a deal for my family as it seems to be for other tica families. For example, my mom always offers visitors their choice of beverage ("¿Quiere usted café, té, refresco? ¿Tiene hambre?") because she herself does not like coffee and much prefers tea.
I have noticed that certain customs that go along with coffee are very different here. For example, coffee drinking seems to be much more habitual and cultural than in the US. While there are certainly people who drink a morning cup of coffee in the US, I have seen people more likely to grab coffee with friends or make it for guests specially in the US. It seems to me that many tica families would not go out for coffee because it is customary to make it at home. The idea of meeting someone out for coffee is almost insulting, as if you don't want them in your house, so you have to meet them elsewhere. Coffee is also more commonly served with meals here. You can drink a cup of coffee with your lunch or dinner. In the US, coffee is served more as a dessert after dinner, possibly accompanied by a cake or biscotti. This culture of coffee consumption has not been difficult for me because my family back home has always used a lot of coffee. By the time I was 7 I could successfully start my dad's morning cup of coffee and had developed a taste for it myself my middle school (of course it would make me short, so I didn't drink it regularly until high school). Back home, my dad often brings my mom a cup of hot coffee to say goodbye in the early morning as he leaves for work. My mom always says, "That's how you know you've found a good one: hot coffee waiting on the bedside table when you wake up!"