All the vietnamese coffee that I tried in europe (even in hype shops) tasted like american “french” roast aka burnt bad coffee. Could you recommend ways to try nice coffees from vietnam?
> All the vietnamese coffee ... “french” roast aka burnt bad coffee
You're describing traditional Vietnamese coffee for ca phe sua or ca phe den, it's close to burnt coffee because the sourced coffee beans are shit so they have to roast close to charcoal that's why we have to add a lot of sugar or condensed milk.
If you want to have coffees that taste close to specialty coffee then there are some local shops that colab or have their own farms that grow quality beans, but Idk if there's exporting roasted coffees.
I've seen a Vietnamese coffee brand from Amazon with fancy branding but my bet is still shitty coffee. Then the recommended way would be traveling to Vietnam, maybe?
Robusta coffees are much more popular across Asia, and there is a preference to mix coffee with milk.
In Europe and the US, there is a preference to drink Arabica coffee neat.
Starbucks had to pivot away from coffee to tea in India for that reason, and Starbucks in Vietnam failed due to their Arabica heavy bias [0] (also, Coffee shops in VN tend to also serve an equally robust Tea menu, which Starbucks fails at)
There are some solid coffee purist shops in D3, but the average consumer prefers Highland, Phuc Long, or Trung Nguyen Legend style shops and mixed coffees.
That said, the same problem mentioned in the blog above are slowly manifesting in VN as well. My in-laws are/were coffee farmers in Gia Lai, but they and their peers have pivoted to nuts like Macadamias instead because margins are better and Coffee is too commoditized
> I've seen a Vietnamese coffee brand from Amazon with fancy branding but my bet is still shitty coffee
Yep.
VN has a good FMCG market now, but they don't really target the US for exports.
It really has gotten to the point that different coffee should be treated as different teas. Nobody expect that the different teas should taste the same. For some reason, the expectation is largely that coffee should be coffee.
And, it is mind bending for some folks to hear that I abhor the taste of arabica coffee. It is so so bad.
Claiming you dislike Arabica is a weird statement. There is a bigger diversity inside of Arabica varietals alone than in tea and wine.
So that part bends my mind.
What about arabica do you detest, specifically? What of origin, processing, roasting, and brewing differences?
Arabica produces such a varied spectrum of cups, it’s really quite head scratching to hear you write off the entire species, yet still hear you drink robusta.
Fair if you are proposing that I probably would not hate all of it? Do you pursue robusta at the same level?
For specifics, its been a while since I tried it. I can seek out some to try again, if you want. I don't think it is as extreme as the "tastes like soap" reaction that many have on cilantro, but I'm growing to think it has to be similar.
I'm one of the lucky people where any coffee is coffee for me. McDonald's, Starbucks, instant coffee, specialty coffee, cat pooped coffee? Yup, it tastes like coffee, I'm good to go.
I put cream and sometimes sugar in my coffee, so I'm surely obscuring most of the subtleties.
But to me, Starbucks still tastes terrible (burned), and Dunkin Donuts is nasty.
In recent years I've ordered my roasted coffee from coffeebeanery.com, and I've been pretty happy. I'm pretty sure all of the varieties I get are Arabica.
Indeed, robusta. It amuses me that I'm probably fine with folgers and/or whatever cheap coffee you can get when in a hotel. At home, I think death wish is the only easy way I know to buy robusta whole bean.
I have had specialty robusta (I have some green robusta in my house right now) but it has always been pretty tough to drink for me, but I don't like adding sugar or milk to my coffee most of the time.
I take my coffee neat, most of the time. Have had more lattes than otherwise lately. And, oddly, that is the only way I can take the taste of arabica coffee. :D
“Go to Vietnam” is maybe not the most practical suggestion for grabbing a cup of coffee, but that’s where I found the best Vietnamese coffee.
As others have said, Vietnamese coffee was traditionally cheaper robusta beans, tended to be lower-quality, and was dark-roasted as a result. More recently, as Vietnam has gotten wealthier, there has been a craft coffee scene developing. I had great coffee in growing regions like Da Lat and Khe Sanh, and in specialty coffee shops in Hanoi like Dream Beans.
Sounds like you got a real Vietnamese coffee. All kidding aside, my experience drinking coffee here (Vietnam) is that most of the coffee shops have bad coffee. I am not sure if it's the beans, the machines or the culture. There is, maybe, 1 in 7 coffeeshop that will do the coffee kinda okay. I don't think the locals care too much (basing on google reviews).
Either way, I'll take this over any other SEA or Asian country where it's a hassle to find coffee outside metro hotspots. Cafes and Coffee here is available everywhere and usually within a 30 seconds walk.
This is a common cliche in the hipster coffee community. The truth is darker roasts change the acid profile of coffee, and many people prefer that taste. To them, drinking a "good" coffee is like drinking a "bad" coffee with a lemon squeezed into it.
A while ago I bought a coffee machine and the gadgets that go along with it. I managed to learn how to extract coffee evenly and all that stuff, but the final product was never tasty. It always tasted like hot puke. Then I realized I liked robusta, which is used for a proper Turkish (or Bosnian or Serbian) coffee that I grew up with.
not really a cliche. that is why starbucks does it. they can cover up taste of poor beans especially when adding milk. most prefer a dark roast because corporations want to make profits and made our tastebuds lazy by force drinking it everyday. just like food with sweeteners or msg. it just kills the purpose of food as a craft. nowadays its even more the opposite there is an hipster revival of dark roast or msg hyping culture as marketing tool to sell it. but lets be homest those things are cache-misère
"poor beans": This is the first time that I heard that Starbucks has poor beans. Can you explain more? To be clear: I am not here to shill for Starbucks.
Also: What do you say about Italians drinking a cappuccino or macchiato (expresso shot with a splash of steamed milk)? From what I have seen while traveling in Italy, most Italians drink coffee at small coffee shops. Or French people drinking cafe latte?
I rarely drank coffee (or tea, although I do drink tea again, somewhat, nowadays).
I used to drink Indian-style milk tea almost daily, earlier, in school, college, and later.
So once, some years ago, when I walked into a Cafe Coffee Day [1] shop (an Indian coffee shop chain, possibly modeled on Starbucks), and after looking at the menu, ordered a macchiato. it was a pleasant surprise to find that it tasted very good. :)
(I had nothing against coffee, it was a common drink at home, growing up, the filter coffee [2] kind, but also Nescafe and Bru, just that I did not prefer it much, later.)
Like what you like, I think that is great. Some people really like dark roasted coffee. Nothing wrong with that, they aren't wrong/unsophisticated/whatever.
However, roasting coffee dark does homogenize the flavor of the coffee, and you do lose more and more of what that coffee tastes like. Coffees have a ton of different flavor compounds, and no two coffees are the same. There are quality issues and processing issues though that don't help to highlight this too, so it's hard to find coffee - even from people who know how to roast - that can shine in this way.
I think everyone should try a good coffee that has some punchy flavors - I'm not saying everyone should like it. It's a fun thing and should be experienced if you're interested.
You can make this argument for all cooking. You could even substitute "light roast" for "dark roast" in the above and it would read exactly the same. Why not brew raw coffee berries?
You can indeed make a (less absolute) form of this argument for all cooking:
Overcooking and adding a lot of spices makes everything (more or less) edible. With less cooking and less spices, you can better taste the original ingredients.
When you say "cooking" here, do you *only* mean roasting coffee beans? Or do you use the term "cooking" more generally? If specific, I agree with your point. If general, I would say that cooking proteins fundamentally changes the food and makes it more digestible (meat, fish, eggs, etc.).
And cooking fundamentally changes the food because cooking is a chemical and physical reaction caused by the heat on the food being cooked. Proteins get denatured, food gets softer or harder (depending upon the amount of liquid and heat added or removed), etc.
I am not a expert on the science of cooking, these are just my casual, slightly scientific observations as a layman :)
I mean, you can agree that there's a difference between raw beef, a rare steak, medium, well done, and carbonized, right? Same deal. Some people may prefer well done and maybe even carbonized, but you have to agree that when you cook a steak that much you lose a lot of what the meat can offer.
You should try green coffee and see what you think. Some roast on the coffee does enhance the flavor, make it more soluble, etc.. "underdeveloped" is definitely a thing.
I'm sure you will agree that raw beef and a steak taste differently?
open a starbucks bean bag and smell it. I dont know one person who would say that smells good.
also french coffee is horrible mostly because it is controlled by only one group in a mafia like fashion where they rent you the coffee machine but you have to buy their beans. italians can make good coffee with old espresso machines and average beans which says more about their skills than anything else.
They are completely right. You put it in flowery words by saying it adjusts the acidity profile of the coffee. When it literally destroys a bunch of flavor compounds and replaces them with burnt notes.
I don’t follow - how do you mask a bad taste (bad coffee) with a bad taste (burned coffee)? I.e. if it’s going to taste bad then use a lighter roast, cheaper and faster anyway.
Burnt coffee taste like burnt coffee. Vietnamese drink coffee with 1/4 can of condensed milk in it.
Bad coffee beans if not roasted to charcoal state taste even worse. Argument that that most of available coffee in VN is made from pretty bad beans, so roasters have no other way to roast it to that level.
I agree. If they weren't making money, they'd go bust, so clearly someone likes the "burnt coffee". It's odd how some posters (not you!) Will act like an obvious opinion is to be taken as fact, and not acknowledge that some people like a certain taste. I mean, some people like super salty anchovies, but I abhor them, but I don't tell the anchovie lovers that they are incorrect.
I think it's because people that complain about "burnt coffee" (me) are people that take their coffee black and probably brew it at come.
Meanwhile, people that don't mind "burnt coffee" are the people that preferred coffee-based drinks from coffee shops. If I get a salted caramel mocha Frappuccino with two pumps of hazelnut - burnt beans are probably the only kind of beans I will be able to taste in that drink.
Dark roast isn't necessarily bad, quite a lot of people prefer the taste, especially if they're adding milk or other things to their drink.
But a dark roast is easier to produce, and easier to produce consistently. If you take high quality beans, and low quality beans, and roast them both to a dark level (let's say "French" or "Italian" roast), they're going to taste approximately the same. Therefore if you're producing coffee at a larger scale and want to save money, you can use cheaper beans and roast them dark to mask the imperfections that come with the cheaper beans.
There are some truly incredible coffees out there and a well-executed light or light-medium roast will bring out those flavors beautifully, but the quality starts at the coffee farm. You can't light roast a low quality coffee bean and expect those same excellent flavors.
The range is somehow (unburnt good coffee) > (burnt good coffee == burnt bad coffee) > (unburnt bad coffee).
If you are in the last box, you cannot get to the first one, but you can still move one step up by burning it. Plus you can add a lot of milk and cream and then it is almost the same anyway.
One could pretend that beans are intentionally burned, "The Vietnamese Way", regardless of the source material quality. Lighter roast would differ from batch to batch with varying not-so-good taste, but charcoal is always a charcoal.
Burnt meat tastes like burnt meat, people are familiar with it and can eat it, even it is not the greatest thing, and burnt meat tastes like burnt meat regardless of how it was in the beginning, so you could imagine that it was actually good, it just happened to be burnt. Not burnt meat has a wider range, it can taste good or bad, it's like in "dead men tell no tales" :)
