A new wave of Vietnamese craft coffee is blooming in America

[Viet]

Head roaster Thu Pham roasts a batch of beans and brews cups of Vietnamese style coffee in her new cafe.


JOE LAMBERTI, USA TODAY NETWORK
On an 88-degree day in August, the lines at Brooklyn’s Winson Bakery snaked around the block, from bus stop to bus stop on baking sidewalks.

The crowds of mostly young, fashionable New Yorkers were waiting for their fix of something you couldn’t easily get in America until quite recently: the blazingly caffeinated, chocolate-caramel rush of fresh-roasted Vietnamese craft coffee.

“It was really incredible to see people were waiting upwards of one hour in line just to get their Vietnamese coffee experience,” said Sahra Nguyen, who’d put together the two-day coffee pop-up in Brooklyn for her company Nguyen Coffee Supply. Though just three years old, Nguyen lays plausible claim to being the first importer and roaster of specialty Vietnamese beans in America.

Vietnamese coffee is like the photonegative of the acidic and fruity Scandinavian-style light roasts that have dominated third-wave coffee in the United States.

It is instead nutty, earthy, dark, dense and above all intense — brewed using a cylindrical phin filter that’s like a silvery stepchild of the French press and the pourover. The coffee is best known as part of Vietnam’s trademark drink of cà phê sữa đá, an iced drink that tempers the coffee’s assertiveness with the sweetness of condensed milk.


Over the past few years, Vietnamese roasteries in America have gone from nearly nonexistent to a nationwide phenomenon, applying the techniques and meticulous sourcing of American third-wave coffee to bold Vietnamese beans.

Vietnamese craft coffee roasters have sprung up in cities from Philadelphia to the caffeinated meccas of Seattle and Austin and Portland, Oregon — run mostly by first and second generation immigrants.



Càphê Roasters plans to open the Philly's first Vietnamese roastery cafe
“It became this beautiful community of Vietnamese entrepreneurs wanting to create a Vietnamese coffee business,” said Philadelphia’s Thu Pham, who co-founded Càphê Roasters in Philadelphia at almost the same time as Nguyen’s roastery in New York. “And what’s great is that it’s mostly led by women."

Pham’s beans are brewed at cafes and restaurants from D.C. to Denver, and regularly sell out at locations of Federal Donuts in Philadelphia — owned by Beard-awarded chef Michael Solomonov.

By the end of September, Càphê Roasters plans to open the city’s first Vietnamese roastery cafe. It would sell not only sữa đá but also Vietnamese espresso and condensed-milk ice cream, and a swirl of Korean and Vietnamese food mirroring the heritage of the roastery’s partners.

Nguyen’s roasts, meanwhile, are sold as far away as San Francisco and Texas, and at a Kansas City Vietnamese coffee truck run by a former Broadway actress. During the pandemic, when many businesses struggled, mail orders for Nguyen’s beans blew up exponentially.

“We actually grew by 13 times in 2020,” said Nguyen, who was able to expand her roasting team from two to five full-time employees. “There's something really special happening here. No gas: It is the coffee. But when there's lines around the block, it's about more than just coffee… . It’s also about our mission to bring diversity, inclusion and equity to the whole coffee experience.”

Vietnamese coffee not always as Vietnamese as it appears
Most of the “Vietnamese” coffee you can find in America doesn't come from Vietnam.

That's not because Vietnam doesn't grow it. Vietnam is one of the world's great coffee cultures, the globe’s second largest producer of beans and the keeper of a distinctive 150-year-old coffee tradition. Ho Chi Minh City coffee shops range from luxe cafes to sidewalk coffee vendors serving coffee both hot and iced, and innovations like coffee made with egg foam or avocado or rose water.

“Every corner in Vietnam there’s a coffee shop,” said Harvey Tong, who last year started a company called Phin Coffee Clubin Austin to showcase the wood-fired coffee his family has been roasting for more than 20 years in Vietnam.

“Vietnamese lifestyle is slower, you go to the coffee shop for a few hours every morning. It’s a big culture there.”
But for decades, Vietnamese coffee was difficult to procure in the United States.
At older Vietnamese restaurants in America, when you order Vietnamese coffee, it may actually be Cajun. Through a quirk of history, the most common coffee brand you find at pho houses and banh mi spots in the U.S. is the chicory-laden roast from famed New Orleans beignet spot Cafe du Monde.

This came as a bit of a surprise to Tong when he arrived in Austin.
“With all due respect to Cafe du Monde, it is not a Vietnamese coffee," he said. "It’s from New Orleans.”

In Austin, Phin Coffee Club sells coffee roasted over rambutan wood by owner Harvey Tong's family in Vietnam, infused with flavors of avocado and salt and slow-caramelized cacao beans.
MATTHEW KORFHAGE

But back in the ’70s, Cafe du Monde’s bitter and bold roast was the closest thing the recent immigrants could find to their home cup — even though chicory was foreign to Vietnamese coffee tradition.
And so Vietnamese immigrants in New Orleans began mailing Cafe du Monde’s trademark orange tins to relatives and friends who’d moved elsewhere in the country. By the ’90s, Cafe du Monde's coffee had become a staple of Asian grocery stores nationwide.

Though it's not Vietnamese, Nguyen at least considers Cafe du Monde part of the Vietnamese immigrant story in America. But more recently, she noticed a pattern she found disturbing.

Riding on the coattails of other Asian flavor trends such as boba and matcha, American cafes with no connection to Vietnam had begun mixing any old dark-roast coffee with condensed milk and calling it Vietnamese. Bloggers posted DIY hacks to to get "Vietnamese" coffee at Starbucks — perhaps by larding up quad-shots of espresso with white chocolate mocha.

“This happens often, where mainstream businesses want to profit off of the cachet of Asian culture, but they don't do it with cultural integrity,” Nguyen said. “Literally every time I would order it, it didn't taste anything like coffee that I knew growing up. I would ask the barista, ‘What's in this drink?’ And they'd say, ‘Oh, it's our house Ethiopian. We add sweetened, condensed milk to it.’”

Nguyen ordered Vietnamese coffee everywhere she found it on the menu, whether old school restaurants or trendy cafes. But none of the coffee came from Vietnam.

Somehow Vietnamese coffee had become popular — but without Vietnamese flavor or ingredients, and often without Vietnamese people. This was part of what led Nguyen to create her coffee company in Brooklyn.

“We were in the middle of third-wave coffee culture,” she said. “But every time I would go into Whole Foods or cafes, I could not find a single-origin, fresh-roasted Vietnamese coffee made with beans from Vietnam.”

A bum rap for Vietnamese beans

Coffee beans are roasted at Caphe Roasters in Philadelphia, Pa.
JOE LAMBERTI/USA TODAY NETWORK ATLANTIC GROUP

The lack of Vietnamese coffee in America is partly the result of an unfair bad reputation, say Nguyen and Pham.

Coffee beans come in two main varieties. The South American and African beans used by high-end roasters like Blue Bottle or La Colombe are made with a coffee variety called arabica, prized for its sweetness and acidity and fruity notes of blueberry or cherry.

But arabica beans don’t grow as well in Vietnam’s hot, wet climate. Instead, 90% of the Vietnamese coffee crop is a hardier variety called robusta, which contains far less sugar and tends toward earthier and more intense flavors.

It’s also loaded with caffeine, nearly twice as much as is found in arabica. Combined with lower growing costs, this has made robusta popular among makers of high-volume and instant coffee.

The association with industrial-grade coffee has given robusta a reputation for being a lower quality bean — shredded-rubber rocket fuel. Instant coffee makers rarely exercise the same quality control as third-wave craft coffee roasters sourcing single-origin beans from the south-facing slopes of Mount Kenya.
But poor quality control is not the fault of the robusta bean itself, Pham said.

Thu Pham roasts a batch of beans at Caphe Roasters in Philadelphia, Pa.
JOE LAMBERTI/USA TODAY NETWORK ATLANTIC GROUP

To prove the point at her soon-to-open cafe in Philadelphia's Kensington neighborhood, Pham prepared a meticulous phin-filter pourover of robusta beans she sourced from a farm in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. She splashed hot water over the ground coffee, waiting out the effervescent bloom of carbon-dioxide fizz that signals fresh-roasted beans.

Like most of the new crop of Vietnamese roasters, Pham has had to source her direct-trade coffee through personal connections, because the supply chain between small farmers and American craft roasters has not yet been forged.
And so she found her coffee through a former student. Pham co-founded Càphê while working for a nonprofit called 12Plus that offers college preparation to students in underserved communities — including a pair from Vietnam who happened to know a coffee farmer.

“I was like, ‘No. How do you know a coffee farmer?” Pham remembers, laughing. “But their parents owned a hostel in Ho Chi Minh. And this young farmer had come to the city looking for housing, because he was searching for a retail location to open up a cafe for his family's coffee.”

The resulting brew at Càphê is round and rich and aromatic, with an intensity of chocolate flavor that would shame Wonka. Made as espresso, it’s no more bitter than a dark Italian, but contains far less acidity. It also boasts enough caffeine to stun a racehorse.

“I've heard so much feedback from people who are self-proclaimed coffee snobs,” Nguyen said, after holding blind taste tests in New York where robusta beans performed favorably. “They'll be like, ‘I've always said that robusta is gross, but I've actually never tried robusta.’”

An ever-expanding crop of Vietnamese coffee

The dark, assertive flavors in Vietnamese coffee are brewed using a phin filter that's a little like a combination between pourover and french press. Shown here is Vietnam's best known drink, ca phe sua da, an iced coffee mixed with sweetened condensed milk.
COURTESY MARIA BE

Since Pham and Nguyen started their roasteries at the end of 2018, Vietnamese specialty coffee has spread in a linked daisy chain across the country. In a craft coffee world that still hasn't shed its reputation as a bastion of bro culture, most of the young entrepreneurs who’ve contacted Pham about roasting coffee have been women.

Nguyen and Pham stress that they don’t view the sudden wave of Vietnamese roasters as competition. Rather, they're partners in changing the perceptions of Vietnamese coffee in America, and in bringing more value to the crops grown by Vietnamese farmers.
“Interested entrepreneurs were reaching out to me, telling me, ‘We're thinking about doing it. Where do you source the coffee? How do you roast the coffee?’” Pham said. “I love that it’s women-led. I love the fact these women were all talking to each other, asking for recipes and advice and being really transparent.”

Pham collaborated with woman-owned coffee brand Fat Miilk in Chicago. In Seattle, four Vietnamese-centered coffee shops and roasteries have opened since 2020. Oregon Vietnamese roaster Portland Cà Phê expanded so quickly this year that owner Kimberly Dam had a hard time sourcing enough robusta beans to keep up with demand.

Roasters from Vietnam are also getting in on the American market. In Anaheim, Vietnamese coffee giant Trung Nguyen opened its first American cafe this spring under the name King Coffee. Tong's Phin Coffee Club beans, roasted over rambutan wood and infused with chocolate and avocado, now sell at every location of Texas grocer Central Market.
The American Vietnamese roasts have caught on at a younger generation of Vietnamese cafes and restaurants, whether Sandwich Hag in Dallas or Phinista in Boston.

At Pittsburgh coffee shop Ineffable Cà Phê, Vietnamese-born Phat Nguyen sells Pham's Càphê brand alongside American-style craft coffee. He also hopes to also get in on the roasting game himself, as soon as he can navigate the byzantine bureaucracy of exporting from his home country: His sister-in-law is a coffee farmer in Vietnam.

The iced coffee made with robusta beans from Càphê Roasters is already his most popular drink, even in a city without many Vietnamese people.

“It’s amazing the kind of support we have as a small Vietnamese cafe in Pittsburgh. This isn’t New York City,” he said. “To be honest, it's amazing that people know what pho is, or what banh mi is, or cà phê sữa đá. Having your culture passed on to other people is an amazing feeling. If you don’t pass on your culture, eventually you stop existing.”

Brooklyn's Nguyen Coffee Supply bills itself as the first specialty Vietnamese coffee importer and roaster in the United States
COURTESY MARIA BE

A new wave of Vietnamese craft coffee is blooming in America

Until recently, Vietnamese craft coffee almost didn't exist in America. Now there's a fresh crop of Vietnamese roasters from Philly to Austin to Seattle

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