Today’s coffee connoisseurs are getting into Vietnamese coffee. Sound strange to your ears, that combo of “Vietnamese” and “coffee?” It actually shouldn’t. Vietnam is the world’s second largest producer of coffee, and the coffees that come from that country and from Southeast Asia are exotically delicious and amazingly smooth. Only Brazil is a bigger producer than Vietnam. So if you are one who seeks the gourmet coffee experience, you absolutely don’t want to remain missing out on the rediscovery of Vietnamese coffee.

The Dutch and the French are to thank for establishing a thriving coffee producing industry and culture in Southeast Asia. In 1890, the French set up several different production sites in the mountainous Annam Region of Vietnam. Here and throughout other areas of Vietnam (as well as Laos and Cambodia), the topography of the slopes and the weather combine to create several different microclimates all within a relatively close vicinity. Each microclimate is particularly suited to the growth of particular coffee species. There are north-facing slopes that have a climate which is entirely different from the opposite, south-side face of the same mountain or hill. Therefore virtually any varieties of beans can be grown here in its “perfect” conditions, up to a height of about 3600 feet. This leads to one of the most delicious and exciting aspects of Vietnamese coffee: the fact that it can be a blend of different species.

Gourmet coffee is, typically, best when it is a blend of different species. People today are used to drinking only Arabica or Robusta coffee without blending. But consumer research proves that there is little preference among the coffee drinking public of one or the other of those species. Meanwhile, when gourmet coffee lovers taste a blended Vietnamese coffee for the first time, they often find themselves exclaiming things like “Now this is how I’ve always imagined coffee should taste” or “Yes, this is what coffee flavor used to be like”. What do blended gourmet coffees provide that single-bean coffees tend to lack? Well, besides the obvious broader range of flavors, the blended coffees also yield a more sophisticated nose, persistence of aftertaste, superior ice coffee flavor, and generally more palate satisfaction. Blended coffees are truly works of art, and the senses these artworks satisfy are those of taste and scent.

But there another thing that makes Vietnamese coffee special: the roasting method. This is very similar to the “French roast” method, at least the original one: lower-temperature, more slowly roasted beans that are not burned like modern common varieties. The slow roasting method yields the darker color but sans any burning or bubbling. Burning or higher-temperature roasting causes the sugars and oils in the coffee beans to break down more quickly so that too much flavor is lost. Slow-roasting methods, which are always used in the making of Vietnamese coffee, preserve flavor–flavors that modern coffee drinkers have often never known could exist in a cup of coffee!