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The Essence of Vietnamese Coffee Culture

They say the most classic "hot coffee" comes from Central and South America, while the most flavorful "iced coffee" is found in Vietnam. I have never been to Central or South America, so I won't make claims about that — but having had the chance to travel to Vietnam, I once experienced drip coffee at a café called Red River Valley. A glass of Vietnamese iced coffee truly delivered both the coffee aroma and relief from the summer heat. In Vietnam, where it is summer all year round, a glass of iced coffee cools, quenches thirst, and refreshes the mind all at once.

Origins of Vietnamese Coffee

Coffee was introduced to Vietnam around 1860 by French Jesuit missionaries, and over its roughly 150-year history the country has developed a coffee culture entirely its own. Today, from Ho Chi Minh City in the south to the mountain town of Sapa near the Chinese border, you can stroll past clusters of canvas canopies and umbrellas, beneath which reclining chairs, hammocks, or small stools face the road, with simple aluminum drip filters sitting on low tables. People sit, lie back, or prop up their feet, sipping — not drinking, not gulping, but sipping — cà phê đá (iced coffee) while watching the girls and motorbike accidents pass by. When the coffee is finished and half a pack of cigarettes smoked, a whole morning, or two-thirds of an afternoon, has slipped away.

Although Vietnam began growing coffee as early as the French Indochina period, the industry only took off in the last twenty years. Today Vietnam is the world's second-largest coffee exporter after Brazil, producing primarily Robusta for three-in-one instant coffee, and accounting for nearly a quarter of global production. Companies like Starbucks and Nestlé regularly buy considerable quantities of Vietnamese beans. The country's best growing region is Buon Ma Thuot in Dak Lak province in the central highlands, whose climate and soil are exceptionally suited to coffee — one of the world's ten best coffee-producing regions.

Vietnam's two representative brands are TRUNG NGUYEN and HIGHLANDS. If Trung Nguyen's flavor is rich and intense, Highlands is elegant and mellow; if Trung Nguyen emphasizes product development, Highlands focuses on store design; if Trung Nguyen is the first choice of Vietnamese locals, Highlands wins over tourists; if Trung Nguyen captures the working class, Highlands commands the middle class; and if Trung Nguyen's owner is local talent, Highlands' leader represents the overseas Vietnamese.

Dang Le Nguyen Vu: The Vietnamese Coffee King Who Abandoned Medicine for Business

Trung Nguyen's history is not long. Its founder and current general manager, Dang Le Nguyen Vu, was originally a medical student. In 1996, at the age of 25, convinced that coffee was Vietnam's most promising industry, he and three friends founded Trung Nguyen in Buon Ma Thuot, in the heart of the coffee-growing central highlands. Beyond taking Vietnamese coffee worldwide, he aimed to improve the lives of local ethnic minorities. Over the following decade, with timing, location, and people all aligned, Trung Nguyen successfully leaped onto the international stage.

Since 2000, Trung Nguyen has won the Vietnam Best Product Award for seven consecutive years. Today the brand runs 400 chain stores and 1,000 franchise stores in Vietnam, and its coffee is sold to more than 40 countries — including the United States, Canada, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Russia, Ukraine, Australia, Japan, Singapore, China, Cambodia, and Thailand. Dang also provides financial assistance to low-income families, martyrs' families, struggling students, young entrepreneurs, and even dioxin victims in Vietnam. From medical-school "deserter" to philanthropist, perhaps this is simply another way of honoring his original vow to heal people.

Trung Nguyen does not use vacuum packaging, because the vacuum process costs coffee some of its aroma. Among its premium products is the so-called "Weasel Coffee," called CAPHE CHON, also known as Legendee or Coffee Weasel. The story goes that Vietnamese weasels enjoyed picking and eating fully ripe coffee cherries; since they cannot digest the beans themselves, they excrete them after their digestive enzymes have worked on them. Workers would then collect the intact beans from the droppings, wash and dry them, and roast them with cream to produce a coffee with a chocolate-like flavor. Thanks to this unusual "achievement" process and its rarity, it is expensive — and, alongside Indonesia's Kopi Luwak (civet coffee), considered one of the world's finest coffees.

Today Trung Nguyen has invited German experts for technical guidance, using special formulas to simulate the weasel's digestive enzymes and create the lower-caffeine Legendee Coffee Weasel — letting people brew the world's best iced coffee without the droppings, with an endlessly lingering aftertaste.

Among Trung Nguyen's other specialties: Premium Culi from Trung Nguyen No. 4, blending chocolate and tamarind aromas for those who like their flavors heavy; Trung Nguyen No. 9 Passiona, the latest low-caffeine release, priced almost the same as Legendee and, in this writer's opinion, especially suitable for women; the boxed House Blend, the brand's most accessible entry-level coffee; and G7 three-in-one instant coffee (reportedly named in hope of entering the seven major developing-country markets, China included) — though as far as coffee aroma goes, I generally don't support instant coffee.

Highlands Coffee: Vietnam's Starbucks

Unlike the local-rooted Trung Nguyen, Highlands Coffee takes an international route, earning the title "Vietnam's Starbucks": its eye-catching logo visible from a distance, outdoor seats filled with different languages, waitstaff in crisp red-and-black uniforms, lantern-style fiber optics paired with lazy sofas perfect for nestling in all day with free WiFi — attracting foreign tourists, business people, and modern Saigon ladies while serving the emerging class of Vietnam's economic boom, the middle class.

Highlands founder David Thai was born in southern Vietnam in 1972 and immigrated to Seattle at age six. Raised in Starbucks' hometown, he decided at 24 to return to Vietnam to start his own business. In 1996 he went to Hanoi to study Vietnamese for a year, researching in Japan, Thailand, Singapore, and other Asian countries along the way. Two years later he founded Highlands Coffee under the Vietnam-Thailand International Joint Stock Company, initially selling products through major Vietnamese hotels and supermarkets. In 2002, the first Highlands café opened opposite the Red Church in Ho Chi Minh City, offering the cinnamon coffee most familiar to foreign tourists. Its Espresso Arabica Supreme uses strictly selected 100% Arabica beans and represents the top of its range. Alongside coffee, Highlands serves simple meals and tea drinks, and performed brilliantly in its first year. Today Highlands has dozens of branches throughout Vietnam and is the brand most consistently trusted by five-star hotels, fine Western restaurants, and three-quarters of tourists.

The Unique Character of Vietnamese Coffee

Whatever the brand, Vietnamese coffees share one trait — a "resilience" quite different from the bourgeois coffee cultures of Europe and Asia, born of a continuous process of "mixed heritage." From the very beginning with France, Vietnamese coffee has never stopped mixing. VINACAFE, for example, introduced a Korean red-ginseng-flavored four-in-one instant coffee that was well received. I have also heard that Taiwanese businesspeople taught the Vietnamese to add MSG to coffee — a fusion flavor that is hard to imagine, and one that certainly is not good for your health.

Vietnam's charm also lies in its special brewing process, which requires only a simple drip filter — the phin — dripping away like an hourglass keeping time. "In France, I've only seen my grandmother use this kind of filter to drink coffee," one French visitor said from experience. The phin's advantages: one cup at a time, easy control of ratio and time, portable, easy to store, simple to clean. Its disadvantage: large sieve holes that inevitably leave a few fine grounds floating in the cup.

Brewing Authentic Vietnamese Iced Coffee

Making an authentic glass of Vietnamese iced coffee takes seven minutes. You will need: medium-ground coffee (to avoid too much residue in the drip), a phin filter, sweetened condensed milk, ice cubes (they must be large and plentiful — coffee only releases its ultimate flavor through the alternating effect of hot then cold), one tall and one short transparent glass (to enjoy the pleasure of watching the drip), and hot water at 96–100°C.

The brewing method is as follows:

1. First pour 3–4 small teaspoons of sweetened condensed milk into the short glass, place the phin on top, and add 3 small teaspoons of coffee powder (about one-sixth of the filter's height). Gently shake the filter to level the grounds.

2. Lower the filter press gently and inject a small amount of hot water — anyone familiar with pour-over knows this is the "bloom." Wait about 30 seconds for the grounds to absorb water and expand. By then the coffee has begun to drip.

3. Press the filter down firmly (neither too tight nor too loose) and pour in hot water to five-sixths full, then cover with the lid. Ideally the coffee finishes dripping in five to six minutes, at about 65 drops per minute. This step is crucial — too fast or too slow signals a problem with the water-to-coffee ratio, the press pressure, or the water temperature, and can leave you with coffee that is too weak, too bitter, or prematurely cooled.

4. Fill the tall glass with ice, turn the phin lid upside down to rest the filter on it (so drips land nowhere but the lid), stir the coffee and condensed milk in the short glass thoroughly, pour it over the ice, and wait another 30 seconds for the coffee, condensed milk, and ice to fully meld before enjoying.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Vietnamese iced coffee lives on Robusta and dark-roasted blends, and FrontStreet Coffee's Brazilian lineup is built for exactly that kind of brewing. As the world's largest coffee producer, Brazil turns out beans with moderate acidity and an excellent balance of sweetness, bitterness, and body — ideal for medium and darker roasts, and usable as single origin or blend. To simply taste classic Brazil, choose the FrontStreet Pulped Natural Cerrado Red Bourbon: from the famous Cerrado growing region, medium roasted to a rich aroma of cream-and-peanut, toasted bread, caramel, and hazelnut, with a rounded, non-sour body and a gentle bitter edge, equally at home in pour-over, moka pot, espresso SOE, siphon, or French press.

For a step up, the FrontStreet Queen Estate Yellow Bourbon comes from the Mogiana region near southern Minas, where fertile red volcanic soil builds unusually full aromatics. A rare mutation of Red Bourbon, the Yellow Bourbon gives a cleaner fruit character, and FrontStreet's lot reveals a sugarcane sweetness — plus fruit and chocolate notes — that other origins cannot quite match, whether brewed by hand, moka pot, or home espresso machine. And if you make your Vietnamese coffee espresso-style, FrontStreet's espresso blends are natural partners: the crema-rich Classic Blend, the nut-forward Premium Blend, the balanced Black Cocoa Blend favored by many baristas, and the café-oriented Commercial Blend all contain Brazilian components, adding chocolate and cream aromas along with a soft sweet-sour-bitter balance that keeps extraction stable cup after cup.