Vietnam Coffee and Phin

My friend recently brought me some Vietnamese coffee on a business trip to Vietnam.

He gave me 2 Arabica and 2 Robusta coffees, and I immediately tried the flavors and aromas through cupping.

Cupping is a common method of coffee evaluation that involves simply grinding a certain amount of beans into a cup to a certain thickness and pouring hot water into the cup to check the taste and aroma of the coffee without any other tools or methods.  While this method of quantifying coffee flavor and aroma through cupping is very useful for establishing a universal standard for coffee flavor, it is also a very dry method that feels more like dissecting a dead coffee than enjoying a living coffee.

In order to enjoy living coffee, I used two methods today.   Today's coffee is a Vietnamese LAM HA robusta.  We're going to use two different brewing tools: the Vietnam Phin, a coffee brewing tool unique to Vietnam, and the Aero Press, which may or may not be similar to it.  The reason for using these two brewing tools is to showcase two different ways of enjoying coffee.   The difference between these two ways of enjoying coffee is where you stand. 

The difference between the two ways of enjoying coffee is "where to stand and meet the coffee", which is not actually a space like a cafe or a house, but it is a matter of deciding whether to meet the coffee in the coffee or at the boundary of the coffee.  

One of my favorite artists is Macrocosco.  I used to stare at his paintings in museums in disbelief, but as time went by and I learned more about him, and as I became more and more tired of this world, his paintings became more and more frightening.  Unlike other artworks, his artworks make you feel like you're not just standing in front of them, but you're inside them.  When you stand in front of it, it makes you feel like you should give a damn about objective, rational, and analytical things, and you just step into it without thinking about it, holding on only to the string of emotions.

 

Coffee can be enjoyed in the same way as Rothko's artwork. 

If we dive into the coffee and taste not only the value of money, which can be converted into a universal and objective standard, but also the taste of the land where the coffee grew, the taste of the hands of the workers who harvested it, and the taste of the sunlight, wind, and water where it was cultivated and trimmed, we will soon be able to taste not only the environment where the beans grew, but also the history of the place where the beans were transformed into a cultural product called coffee.  I think of it as enjoying the coffee within the coffee, the moment when you have a deeper and more detailed understanding of coffee in such a multilayered way. 

For a brief introduction to Vietnamese coffee, Vietnam is the world's second largest coffee producer after Brazil.   It started as a colony of French Indochina in the 19th century, but it was only after the country drove out the French and American empires that it became so large, so Vietnamese coffee has a unique flavor that has a sad and nostalgic taste of the French colonial period and the pride of the liberated and independent Vietnam.  To get that flavor, you actually need to use a unique Vietnamese coffee brewing tool called a Vietnamese pin.  It's actually not a good brewing tool in terms of cost-effectiveness or efficiency, which is what we usually look for these days.  Not only does it take a long time, but the flavor isn't great.(???)  

However, I can't think of a tool that better embodies the bitterness of Vietnamese history, a symbol of the sadness of French colonization, and the sweetness of liberated Vietnamese pride.

 

Another fascinating aspect of coffee is the way it can be experienced on the edge, as opposed to the way it can be tasted within.  It is the place where you meet coffee by diluting the color of people and history and focusing on the charm of the coffee bean itself.  The tool that does this most visibly is the aeropress.  The story of this tool is also a long one, so I'll save it for another time...

Today's Vietnamese Pins and the coffee I brewed with the aeropress are the same beans, but they have completely different flavors and aromas.  While the Vietnamese pin tries to bring out all the layers of the coffee, the aeropress tries to showcase the best of the coffee while leaving all the other flavors behind.

There is no right or wrong.  There's no hierarchy of better or worse.  It's just a matter of where you stand.