Full of beans: coffee culture in Vietnam
Ronan O’Connell discovers a national passion for the brew.
Hanoi’s Old Quarter buffets the senses like few locations on the planet.
Your ears ring from the roar of swarming motorbikes. Your eyes strain to focus on one particular unusual sight amid streetside ear cleaners, mobile shoe repairmen and open fires on the pavement.
Your nose is seduced by the scents of frying fish, freshly- baked bread, spicy grilled pork and fragrant noodle soups.
Walking through this tangle of alleys and narrow, busy streets, one sensory input suddenly overpowers the others. Here, on a small stretch of Hang Buom Street, there is a powerful yet welcome aroma of coffee.
In Vietnam’s capital, shops selling the same product often group together. There is Fan Street, Underwear Street and Shoe Street. Hang Buom Street is the epicentre of coffee distribution in Hanoi. A cluster of shops are packed to their crest with beans of all varieties.
The Vietnamese are passionate about coffee and the culture they have built around it is renowned. From Ho Chi Minh City in the deep south, to Hoi An on the central coast and Hanoi in the far north, cafes litter the streetscape. Old men ensconced in wicker chairs sip the syrupy, sweet and' potent' coffee which has become an icon of the nation.
In every guidebook and on every travel website about the country, trying this thick Vietnamese coffee is rated as an essential experience. Yet, on a global level, Vietnam is not a country synonymous with the drink. Brazil, Costa Rica and Colombia have big reputations as exporters of fine coffee.
The beans harvested in those Central and South American countries end up in cups in trendy cafes the world over. Vietnamese beans, however, are more likely to end up ground down into cheap instant coffee.
After Brazil, Vietnam is the biggest producer of coffee on the planet. In the 2013 calendar year, Government figures show Vietnam produced about 27.5 million “units” of coffee. With one unit being a 60kg bag, this equates to an extraordinary 1.65 billion kilos of coffee.
That figure dwarfs the collective annual production of Costa Rica, Colombia and Ethiopia, which is known as the birthplace of coffee. It has become such a major part of Vietnam’s foreign trade that coffee now rates ahead of rice as its biggest export crop, contributing more than $3 billion to its economy in 2013.
These astronomical figures are relevant, though perhaps hard to fully comprehend, for the sellers on Hang Buom Street. Their businesses operate on a far smaller scale, although some of them dream of becoming major international players.
Nguyen Kim Lai reads about the growth in coffee production and fantasises about what that could mean for her family’s business. One of the most famous coffee distributors in Hanoi, Kim Lai Cafe opened in 1972 when the trade was still in its infancy in Vietnam. For a long time, the business started by her father-in-law operated out of his small house in a back alley of Hanoi’s Old Quarter.
In the wake of the Vietnam War, the country’s economy was in ruins before, in the mid-1980s, the Government decided to pursue coffee farming as a major source of revenue
At this same time, Mrs Kim Lai’s father-in-law retired and she took control of the business. Sensing greater opportunities lay ahead, she expanded its operations to bigger premises on Hang Buom Street in 1986.
Today the company exports coffee globally and employs more than 70 people in Hanoi. Mrs Kim Lai said many of their export clients were simply tourists who happened to wander into her shop.
As we sit in her cafe chatting over a cup of fresh coffee, a stream of foreign customers come and go. There is a finicky young American man, grilling staff about the history of the beans he is considering for purchase. After him comes a pair of hippy German ladies who want to be sure the coffee is locally made and will benefit Vietnamese growers.
Then there’s the middle-aged English couple on their first trip to Asia, who with wide eyes make it clear they had no idea Vietnam even produced coffee.
Mrs Kim Lai says she believes that this lack of global recognition is beginning to change. The sheer quantity of coffee which Vietnam exports alone will not make it a renowned exporter. But growing quality will, as can its different varieties, such as the weasel coffee in which her shop specialises.
Despite its name, this bean is unrelated to weasels and is instead linked to the civet, a small, nocturnal mammal which thrives in Vietnam’s central highlands. These beans are swallowed, digested and then defecated by the civets. The process of passing through the animal’s digestive tract transforms the beans into not just a “smoother, richer coffee”, as Mrs Kim Lai says, but into a product which sells in Hanoi for up to $550 per kilo.
The exotic coffee is one of the most expensive in the world and is sought after by aficionados across the globe.
Kim Lai Cafe has a close relationship with growers in Dak Lak province, who produce weasel, along with myriad other coffee bean varieties. It is here, amid the humid, fertile climate in Vietnam’s central highlands, that a majority of the country’s coffee is grown.
Mrs Kim Lai says she hopes Vietnam focuses its coffee exports on quality over quantity, something which her father-in-law instilled in her as a business ethic 30 years ago.
She tells how, since the drink was introduced following French invasions more than 150 years ago, it has been savoured by the Vietnamese. The excellence of your coffee, not the volume which you sold, was the true mark of a respected cafe or distributor.
Will her country’s coffee industry follow suit?
Mrs Kim Lai hopes so.
FACT FILE
Kim Lai Cafe is at 99 Hang Buom Street in the Old Quarter, just north of Hoan Kiem Lake in downtown Hanoi.
Dak Lak Province is 50km west of the famous beach resort Nha Trang. Its capital, Buon Ma Thuot, is surrounded by coffee farms and, as a result, has an extraordinary number and variety of cafes.
Weasel coffee beans in Hanoi sell for about $80 per kilo for factory-farmed varieties and up to $550 for free-range products.
