True Vietnamese Coffee (INeedCoffee.com)

True Vietnamese Coffee

More and more coffee lovers have discovered Vietnamese coffee, its little single-cup filter, and the rich, dark cup it produces. Vietnamese coffee "style" refers to treating the brewing and enjoyment of coffee as a event, not just a commodity that you grab at a drive-in window on the way to work. But many of these people who think they are enjoying traditional Vietnamese coffee would be surprised to discover that they are actually drinking South American beans roasted in Louisiana by a company owned in Canada!

In Viet Nam, the Vietnamese drink Vietnamese coffee. Most drink Trung Nguyen (pron. "chun-win"), grown in the Buon Me Thuot (pron. "bon-meh-toe") highlands and packed in Ho Chi Minh City, with over a thousand coffeehouses throughout Viet Nam and Southeast Asia. Vietnamese-style coffee brewing, using true Wietnamese-grown coffee, has become popular now in over a dozen countries primarily in Southeast Asia, Australia and Europe.

Filter

French Market and Cafe du Monde brands of coffee, often thought in the USA to be traditional Vietnamese coffee, are not produced in Viet Nam. Yet, many restaurants and Vietnamese-Americans use these coffees in preparing Vietnamese style coffee, and as a result, many consumers think that these brands are somehow a part of the tradition. Why? The reason is simple: When Vietnamese immigrants came to the United States, they could not find Trung Nguyen coffee here. The USA did not import products from Viet Nam, and it was hard to get the coffee brought over from friends and relatives. So they searched for another coffee that was suited to the small Vietnamese single-cup brewers, and settled on French Market-style coffees.

Café du Monde, as an example, is another strong coffee made for French press brewing, with a coarse enough grind to work in traditional Vietnamese brewing. However, Café du Monde also is noted for its chicory flavor. Chicory is not used in traditional Vietnamese coffees. What characterizes true Vietnamese coffee is the history of cultivation that began as far back as the latter half of the 19th century. Today this is reflected in the use of multiple varieties of coffee, not just the Arabica that is touted so highly in the West. Trung Nguyen and other producers in the country mix blends of Arabica, Robusta, Chari and Catimor. Chari is another word for Excelsa.

Southeast Asian roasters also have a unique roasting process that includes the use of clarified butter oil and a particular type of physical turning of the beans as they roast. Trung Nguyen as a company grew from an established roasting company from decades ago, which in the 1990s responded to the coffee glut and other issues in Vietnamese coffee production by asking the government of Viet Nam for cooperation in re-establishing standards of quality that had characterized Vietnamese coffee back in its "golden era" of the first half of the 20th century. These standards were first established by the French and were carried on until they were disrupted by the traffic during the war.

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