Vietnams Coffee Revolution (And Where It Began).

You probably think you already know Vietnamese coffee. The drip filter, the condensed milk, maybe egg coffee if you've been to Hanoi. But everything you know was originally an adaptation, a response to scarcity, survival, or opportunity. So today we're drinking coffee all over Hanoi. Every stop tells a different part of the story because in Vietnam coffee is not just a drink, it's a record of everything the country's been through. And we'll start here at a cafe that's been brewing since colonial times. This is cafe Xuy Chi, family run since 1936. It's tucked inside a classic Hanoi tube house, maybe two meters wide but deep with stairs that run straight through the living space. And for nearly 90 years it's been serving coffee to the city. We'll order a cafe no nam, hot coffee. If it's sweltering I'll switch to da or ice. Coffee arrived with the French in 1857. The tropical climate and soil were perfect for it. Initially the French planted erotica on plantations in the north around Ninh Binh and Quang Binh provinces, far from Vietnam's main coffee producing regions today. For the French, coffee was a commodity grown for export and for French people living in the country. But Vietnamese people loved it. And soon cafes like this one started opening to meet local demand. It wasn't just the coffee, it was the whole ritual. This apparatus, the fiend filter, also dates back to the colonial era. It works by using gravity to slowly drip hot water through a bed of ground coffee. And I mean slowly. It takes several minutes to brew, enough time to check your phone, stare out the window, rethink your life choices. But that's part of the ritual. The drink forces you to slow down. Now the condensed milk was a local adaptation. Fresh milk was scarce and refrigeration unreliable or non-existent. So canned sweetened condensed milk became the default. And that decision locked in a flavor profile and a texture that's still here more than a century later. Man, I love this stuff. This coffee is no joke strong. Dark rose, slightly smoky, pretty bitter even though it's an arabica bean. There's a nuttiness to it and it really is more bitter than a lot of coffee that I'm used to drinking outside Vietnam. But the condensed milk rounds it out and it gives it a little hint of caramel and chocolate. I mean this is it. This is the classic Vietnamese coffee. And a place like this that's been around for 90 years knows how to make it. The setting just adds to the experience. So Xui Chi marks the start of domestic coffee culture. The point where an expert commodity becomes a daily drink. Let's walk to the next place. So in the late 19th early 20th century coffee production spread south especially to the central highlands which is still the heart of Vietnam's coffee production today. This was industrial scale agriculture and it worked. By 1940 Vietnam was producing 2,000 tons of coffee a year. Great stuff. Then disaster hit. First a fungus called coffee leaf rust wiped out much of the arabica crop. Farmers switched to hardier Robusta and Liberica species. Keep those in mind we're going to come back to them later. Then came Vietnam's brutal 20th century. World War II. Japanese occupation. War with the French and finally the Vietnam War. Virtually every industry collapsed. Coffee farms were destroyed or abandoned. Exports dried up. By 1975 the war was over and the coffee industry was in ruins. After reunification the government made agriculture a priority and coffee was chosen as a strategic export. Something that could bring in foreign currency again. But there was a problem. After all that war and upheaval Vietnam no longer had the equipment or the expertise to restart large-scale coffee production. And that's when help came from an unlikely source. In the 1970s socialist East Germany was facing its own coffee crisis. Imports were expensive. Global prices were high. Supplies were running short. You can't exactly grow coffee in Germany. So the GDR tried all kinds of substitutes including the infamous Mischkaffee. A mix of coffee and roasted grains. It was terrible. People hated it. But it wasn't just empty cups. This was a political problem. If the socialist state couldn't even provide coffee what did that say about the state itself? So Germany turned to its socialist comrades in Vietnam. No longer at war. Perfect climate. History of coffee production. They sent equipment, agronomists and money. Invested tens of millions of dollars in exchange for half of Vietnam's future harvests. These were mostly Robusta beans. More bitter than Arabica but heartier. Higher yielding. More amenable to mechanized harvesting. And fully capable of meeting German demand. After years of shortages Germans weren't about to complain. And for Vietnam it was great. They got foreign aid, jobs and a commodity they could export for hard currency. Great plan right? Except coffee takes a few years to develop fruit. And by the time the first harvest was ready, in one of history's great ironies, the Berlin Wall had fallen. East Germany no longer existed. So now it's 1990. Vietnam is sitting on a ---- ton of coffee with no buyer. Hold on I need to run an errand. Okay don't leave. This is important. This bag is a big part of our story. One of the byproducts of all that German investment wasn't just a great harvest. Vietnam now had a real coffee industry with farms, drying yards, processing plants. And by the late 1980s it also had something else. A much freer economy. In 1986, Doi Muoi Reforms opened markets, legalized private enterprise, reconnected Vietnamese businesses with the world. Those reforms turned that infrastructure into opportunity. Private traders started exporting green robusta beans, unroasted coffee, to multinationals like Nestle and Kraft. Between 1986 and 96, coffee production grew at more than 20% a year. By the end of the decade, Vietnam had become the world's second largest coffee exporter, right behind Brazil. But this story isn't just about exports, it's also about what happened inside the country. And that's where Trung Nguyen comes in. Founded in 1996 in Buon Ma Thuot, right in the central highlands, Trung Nguyen was born out of that post-Doi Muoi moment. Same robusta beans, same infrastructure built by the Germans, but with a new mindset. For the first time, Vietnam didn't just have to export raw beans. It could produce, brand, and sell its own coffee. Hold on I need to pay. G7 was the coffee that really put Trung Nguyen on the map. A big moment came in 2003 where they held a famous blind taste test in Ho Chi Minh City. Consumers tasted G7 alongside other famous instant coffee brands without knowing which was which. A stunning 89% preferred Trung Nguyen over major international brands, including the famous Nescafe. This was the coffee people drank at home and what they served the guests when they came over. And people were proud of it. A national label from north to south, even shipped around the world. I don't normally drink sweetened coffee, but this 3-in-1 with cream and sugar is actually pretty good. But it's still instant coffee. Let's go get a real cup. Okay this is better. We're at Oriberry, one of the first cafes in Vietnam to ask a different kind of question. And not just how much coffee can Vietnam produce, but how well. This place grew out of a community project in Quang Tri province. They taught better farming practices, supported cooperatives, and built direct trade links so farmers could make a living from their own beans. In a way, Oriberry represents a national shift. For decades, Vietnamese coffee was about quantity. Tons grown, tons exported. And even Trung Nguyen was about mass production. But in the early 2000s, small roasters like this began rethinking what Vietnamese coffee could be, focusing on quality, traceability, and craft. Each bag here lists exactly where the beans come from. Quang Tri, That transparency was new here. It linked the cup in your hand to real farmers in real places. We'll go with a nice northern blend. Instead of phin, we're doing a pour over. A style I like that lets you really taste the bean. You can feel how the culture shifted here. Vietnam entering the global third wave coffee movement, but doing it on its own terms. There's no imported aesthetic, no foreign brand dictating the rules. It's still local, still Vietnamese. That is so nice. It's very different from the heavy, bitter Robusta that's commonly served all over Vietnam. This is a very light, very floral. It doesn't end super sour and fruity like a Kenyan or a Tanzanian. Boy, that's a really nice cup. This place is more than a cafe to me. This is also where I buy the beans that I make at home. A great place to get good quality local Vietnamese coffee. That's the real evolution from export commodity to national habit to something people take real pride in producing. All right, let's go to the next place. We're at this small cafe in Hanoi's Hoan Kiem district for one reason only, to drink Liberica coffee. Now, most people know Arabica and Robusta, but there are actually over 120 recognized coffee species in the world. Liberica originated in West Africa and was widely grown in the Philippines during Spanish colonial rule. It was also one of the first varieties planted by the French in Vietnam, where it got the name cafe meat or jackfruit coffee. After Arabica was devastated by leaf rust in the 1940s, production of Liberica expanded briefly. Like Robusta, it's hardy, disease-resistant, and can grow at lower altitudes, but it never really took off in Vietnam or anywhere else for one simple reason. It's bloody hard to grow. The trees can reach 20 meters, about the height of a six-story building, and they have to be hand-picked. That's a lot more labor for a lot less yield. Today, Liberica accounts for only one and a half percent of global coffee production, and only a handful of countries even bother to grow it. Luckily, Vietnam's one of them. The aroma is light and fruity, but with a bit of grassiness or greeniness added. It's hard to describe, because while it's definitely coffee, it has a real kind of vegetal element to the aroma. Man, it's so interesting. It maintains that floral quality, that fruity quality, almost a little bit like the jackfruit that it's named after, but the little woodiness and grassiness, it's so unique. If you're a coffee fanatic, and you've never had Liberica, and you're in Hanoi, I think you should come here and give it a try for yourself. It's an experience you can't have in every country, and one that I think you'll appreciate. Liberica is a species that survived at the margins, an important part of Vietnam's coffee story, now being rediscovered by people who care enough to look back. I really do love it, but I have one last place I want to take you. We've come a long way from colonial cafes to instant coffee to small roasters like Oriberry and Donau, but this, this is something else. This is Refined. No, I mean, that's the name of the cafe. Fien Bar by Refined, next to Hanoi's Temple of Literature. Everything here is exact. Beans measured to the gram, water temperature and brew time, back to the second. Every roast, grind and pour, mapped and logged. This is the kind of place you'd expect to find in Melbourne, Vienna or Tokyo. And like those global coffee centers, they don't just serve Vietnamese coffee, they import single origin beans from all over the world and roast them right here. That alone says something. Vietnam isn't just producing coffee anymore, it's participating in global coffee culture as both producer and consumer. But I think the most ambitious thing Refined is doing isn't importing beans, it's rethinking the bean Vietnam already grows. Refined's core mission is to elevate Robusta, the variety that built Vietnam's coffee industry, and prove that, with the right care, it can rival Arabica in taste and quality. It hits with that initial Robusta bitterness just for like a nanosecond and then that dissipates. It's a lot more full mouth feel. The biggest surprise for me is it's not there. Vietnamese Robusta coffees I often associate with the bitterness that easily cut with the condensed milk. This gives you that for like a second and then it just opens up really nicely, nicely made For years, Vietnamese coffee was framed as cheap, utilitarian, or overly sweet. And even its most iconic drinks, delicious as they are, lean heavily on things like condensed milk and ice. But places like this show that Vietnam's no longer catching up as a place for coffee connoisseurs. It's arrived. You'll notice I haven't talked about a lot of things many other videos focus on. The egg coffee, salt coffee, coconut coffee and all that. But those are absolutely part of Vietnam's story. Egg coffee, poured over a sweet meringue, invented in the 1940s when milk was scarce. Salted coffee, a mix of espresso, milk, and a pinch of salt, first popularized in Hue. Coconut coffee, born in the South, mixing espresso with coconut cream or frozen coconut milk. And now you see beans infused with lychee, melon, even whiskey. All local inventions, all part of how this tradition stayed alive for more than a century. From the old fiend filter to these new creations, Vietnam's never stopped playing with what coffee can be. More than a century ago, Vietnam learned coffee from the world. Now, I think the world can learn a thing or two about coffee from Vietnam.