The Phin: Why Vietnamese Coffee Makes You Wait

A stamped-metal cup, a bed of grounds, and gravity. Nothing
else.

It doesn’t look like much. A small metal cup with a lid, nothing more
complicated from the outside.

A chamber about the size of an espresso cup, a perforated base, a
loose disc, or press, that settles on the grounds, and a lid to keep the
heat in. The Vietnamese call it a phin, and the coffee it makes cà
phê phin. Ours came home from Hanoi wrapped in a shirt, and it is
the least impressive object either of us has ever carried that
carefully.

It sits on top of your glass rather than beside it, which is the
first thing that gives it away. No machine, no pump, no pressure,
nothing plugged into a wall. Whatever is going to happen has to happen
in front of you, on the table, at the speed the coffee decides.

How
Vietnamese coffee is brewed, in the slowest way available

You spoon the grounds in, settle the press on top, and pour a little
hot water over. Just enough to wet the bed and let it swell. Then fill
almost to the top with more hot water, then the lid, and then
nothing.

Gravity pulls water down through a bed of grounds, and the press
decides how hard it has to work to get there. Screw it down and the drip
slows. Around five minutes, for a small, thick, very strong cup. Leave
it loose and the coffee comes through fast and thin.

Where
the cà phê phin came from, as far as anyone will say

The story most people tell is that the phin arrived with the French,
a piece of colonial coffee-making kit we’ve never once come across in a
French café, that Vietnam kept and made its own, and that the condensed
milk, often in the bottom of the glass, is there because fresh milk was
scarce and the tinned kind was not. We rather like both stories, whether
or not they’re the whole truth.

Vietnamese coffee is overwhelmingly robusta, stronger and
more bitter than the arabica most speciality cafés serve, carrying close
to twice the caffeine. Five slow minutes of contact with a bed of it
produces something nearer to syrup than to filter coffee. Condensed milk
is not a sweetener on that. It is a counterweight.

The argument for waiting

A barista in Hanoi showed us why the first pour is small. Wetting the
grounds lets them bloom, releasing the trapped air and preparing them to
give up their flavour evenly. It reminded Alice immediately of her
gardening days. When you water dry soil you do not flood it all at once.
You dampen the surface, let it soak in, and then give it a proper drink.
She had never imagined coffee making and gardening would have anything
in common, and then suddenly the comparison seemed perfectly
natural.

The first time, we watched it. Both of us, glancing at the phin,
willing it along. Nick does prefer his coffee hot.

By the third cup we had stopped watching it, instead taking the time
given to us by the coffee to people watch, from our low little stools at
street level.

A farmer asked us whether we knew the hands that picked our coffee,
and we did not. We are still finding out.
Most of the finding out, so far, has happened while waiting for
something to drip.

If you’d like to follow the adventure, we’d love you to come
along with us.