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My journey into coffee (or should I say back intoâŠ) is a wild one. Being a proud Vietnamese who departed abroad for further career prospects, I felt the calling to step back into this world of free productivity, pure rocket fuel, perfection-crafted delicacy, or morning hobby, and become more aware of my upbringing from the single biggest exporter of robusta coffee of the entire world. I mean⊠how can I really not being a Vietnamese, much less a Saigonese?
The mere existence of coffee permeates throughout every nook and extends to every single alleyway dead end. Almost every single corner of the street, almost every other storefront we would walk or drive across, would either be a cafe (big or small), or at least a food place that sells coffee. As I keep working and living in one of the fastest-growing cities of the United States, I realized that I needed a more efficient and effective approach to understanding Austin, Texas on a more intimate level. I mean⊠at a little bit more than two years of living in Austin, I felt like this concrete forest had a perplexingly strong and unique identity to it, but exactly what identity and to which degree is something I have always struggled to wrap my head around.
Austin feels like a new date Iâm still getting introduced to, and my camera shutter clicks and the images that I make have been, for the past two years, the questions I extend to her at the coffee shop table. Being the impatient one of the two, I am habitually violently shaking my leg, waiting for her to let her guard down and finally show me all that she is and all that she holds. In pondering my approach to living in this city aside from the mindless everyday productivity, I came to realize that Iâve been attempting to get to know Austin through photography, through the countless camera walks I would take throughout central Austin and other walkable areas. I can really try to understand the city through all the interests, hobbies, and passions I have, and since I put myself out there and meet my residential city in the middle where we click (yes, I know, itâs a cheap pun), it would be much more effective of a venture to understand each other. I also got a chance to know the Austin niche hobby market a tiny bit more by co-hosting a couple of mechanical keyboard meetups throughout the end of 2022 and the first half of 2023. As is quite evident by Fractureâs other fragment, I also have a deep nerdy love for mechanical keyboards, even though I am still quite conservative in my approach to engaging with its community compared to other enthusiasts.
Austin holds something for everyone, I always tell people in conversations, and it has deep rich cultures and communities surrounding them too. You just have to put yourself out there and be active in your pursuit of those âsomethingsâ.
Fortunately for me (rather unfortunately, but Iâd like to look on the bright side), I was recently broken, ripped, and pulled apart by a prolonged traumatic experience that left me in complete disarray, and thus turned to my passions as material for reconstruction and rediscovery. Retracing back to my roots, I realized how integral coffee has been as a part of me. Every noteworthy conversation in my life has over coffee. Every short nights and productive mornings Iâve had in my restless academic endeavors has been sponsored by coffee. Every photo walk I take, trying to converse with my hometown on an artistic front, ends with a coffee break photo self-recap session before hopping back onto my motorbike and driving home. This dark brown bean has been walking beside me all this time, and it is a pity I never got to understand it and what makes it good. And thus, in the spirits of recovery and self-rediscovery, I started exploring how I can tell the story of who I am through the coffee bean. And to do that effectively requires me to dive deeper into the more niche, more nerd, and more expansive history and progression of the bean, the industry, and the hobby itself.
Being brought up by what used to be the capital of French Indochina, I had always taken for granted how the story of Saigon and story of myself can be told through the lens of the coffee beans Saigonese drink, our iconic brewers, and the cups they produce as a combined effort. I mean⊠considering how utterly important this city used to be for the entirety of Southeast Asia and for Vietnam, and how utterly important coffee is to the peoples, cultures, and social lives here. For as long as we can remember, us Saigonese have always been passing around an iconic phrase - SĂ i GĂČn CĂ PhĂȘ Sữa ÄĂĄ (Saigon Iced Milk Coffee, with milk in this case referring to sweetened condensed milk) - to refer to the ever so iconic drink which non-Vietnamese would associate with Vietnamese food places, but especially to refer to an activity, a vibe, a way of life. Sitting at a tiny coffee shop by the side of the road underneath the greenery shades, watching people pass you by in the midst of the flows of their busy lives, and enjoying an exceptionally dark roasted robusta coffee hastily stirred with the most generic convenience store condensed milk anyone can find. Come to think of it, there is quite literally nothing special about this drink whose yucky dark-roasted burnt wood tastes are squashed by an incredibly sweet processed milk. Yet, to this day it is still the perfect go-to drink in my book, and I would not have it any other way. There is something secretly charming about that bold rich flavor crashing through that veil of dairy creaminess, creating a unique marriage between bitter and sweet that is presented with a creamy texture and a heavy mouthfeel. This comes in to be quite the opposition to the stereotypical preferred taste profile and mouth feel of the over-generalized Western drinks - fruity, juicy, floral leaning a bit sour, paired with sweet and smooth milk (dairy or not), both aiming for that target of an extremely light mouthfeel, aka what people refer to as smooth. There is something so endearing about this iced drink on a hot summer day (well⊠in this city, any given day is a summer day), watching streams of people in an incredibly busy and overproductive city from underneath the shade of trees by the side of the street, pondering life or even nothing at all. This is the Saigon way.
All of that is to say that, coffee, to me, is an identity. A side of the geometry that represents my characteristic. Whether it likes it or not, it has been with me throughout every single step of the way. I still remember the very first cups of coffee I had ever tasted. Every Sunday during primary school after extracurricular English class, my uncle would take me and my little brother to this one coffee/breakfast restaurant with a gigantic center garden and an artificial waterfall streaming down one of the sides of the cafe. Some of the walkways to the tables cross over the river stream formed by the waterfall by these black marbled rocks. Vines with colorful flowers scattered all over the remaining sides of the cafe garden. A giant old tree with the greenest hanging vines situated right in the middle of the garden. The menu was surprisingly affordable for such an intricate complex as Iâd described. Granted, the coffee from what I remembered was sub-par, which I did have the chance to reconfirm a decade later down the line during one of the trips I made back home after moving to the United States.
It was a classic Saigon iced coffee with condensed milk, served in a highball/Collins glass with ice filled to the brim. The highball filled with ice was usually brought out first, with a glass-length plastic stirring spoon and an optional straw jabbed to the side of the ice. A phin filled with ground robusta was set on top of a smaller rocks-style glass containing about 2oz (very eyeball amount, varies on personal preference and cafe servings) of sweetened condensed milk. Oftentimes the waiters/waitresses would bring a boiling kettle to our table, and start pouring the boiled water into the bed of ground robusta that was pre-compressed in the phin. I do not exactly recall the practice of blooming the phin coffee being employed at any cafe I went to when I was younger, but apparently it had been around for a while before that from my momâs accountings. In fact, she was the one who introduced me to both the practices of pre-heating the phin and blooming the coffee bed with about a 1:1 ratio before filling the rest of the column in the phin with water and closing the lid. What usually followed was the distinct smell of the dark, potent, and sometimes burnt robusta that is quite hard to mistake with any other smell, and the smell would radiate across our entire table. To be quite honest, the objective me right now would feel absolutely indifferent towards that brewing robusta smell, but the element of nostalgia plays such a crucial role in the fact that I am strangely attracted to that burnt smell, and the supposed taste of the coffee that follows it. It is a companion to the feelings of bliss, and a time with significantly less worry of everyday life.
But coffee is not just an important team player to me and only me. For as long as I can remember, that tradition of going out for coffee and breakfast has been a family tradition of ours pretty much every Sunday. Regardless of what happens, or how busy each of our lives are, we do not miss Sunday coffee. It was our Sunday church. Our chance to catch up with one another and how the week went for everyone. With the exception of my brother, who would still rather bite off his own tongue before voluntarily drinking any cup of coffee, cĂ phĂȘ sữa ÄĂĄ accompanied everyoneâs dishes or bowls of breakfast every single time.
Gradually, after I had moved to the United States, my parents would transition into a Saturday coffee with one another, and a Sunday coffee to catch up with my dadâs best friend and his family.
The ritual of going to get coffee every morning was the only practice that kept my mom grounded during the singular most rocky time of her life - being on the verge of losing her own mother in a foreign country at a foreign hospital. With her spotty and rusty English, one of the only things she could speak was placing an order at the hospital cafe for her, her brother, and her bed-bound mom. Even that single practice that seemingly holds no significance at all at the time is an enormous motivator for me to continue exploring coffee the way that I do right now, and it is only amplified when paired with the fact that my mom and her mom are the two individuals whoâve had the most profound impacts on shaping my personality and character today. Coffee re-taps into my connection to them and to my family, and it keeps me grounded during any time of significant change and challenge.