Origins of Vietnamese Phin & Indian Drip Filter Coffee ● The French Connection

via GIPHY

I am a big fan of Vietnamese drip filter coffee since my first taste of it in Los Angeles in the early 1990s. Yeah, many of us had our first taste of things Vietnam through its diaspora.

Fell in love with it with the first sip - the robust, deep bitter sweet taste and the sharp caffeine kick that jolted us back to life from the long flight from Singapore. It was like jump starting flat batteries.

I was intrigued by the drip filter device known in Vietnamese as phin and always wondered about how the idea of the quaint little contraption came about.

(Now retired already, decades later, very free to research into such things 🤭 )

The phin consists of four parts (from the top):

Lid - Covers the filter canister while coffee is brewed. Doubles as a little dish for resting the filter canister after brewing.  

Filter canister / chamber - The canister is open topped while the base is perforated. When hot water is poured, the small holes let the brew pass through (into the cup below) but keep the coffee grounds inside.

Strainer - This sits in the canister on top of the ground coffee. It lightly compacts and keeps the ground coffee at the bottom of the canister while brewing the coffee.

Base - The entire filter canister sits on this perforated dish set on top of the drinking cup during the brewing process.

I earlier speculated that it was the Vietnamese answer to the French press or cafetière, but now found out that it wasn't.

Recently, I stumbled upon Indian drip filter coffee, more specifically south Indian filter coffee.

This triggered me to relook at my assumptions about the origins of the Vietnamese phin.

The south Indian coffee filter is very similar to the Vietnamese drip filter in principle and form.

There's a lid, brewing canister (with perforated base), perforated strainer, and a collection / drinking cup. 

I was surprised but couldn't immediately see how south Indian and Vietnamese coffee might be connected.

Then a quick check, confirmed my suspicion that there could perhaps be a French connection.

And, there was!

Coffee came early to India from Arabia in 1670. According to Indian coffee lore, an Indian pilgrim to Mecca, known as Baba Budan, smuggled coffee beans back to India from Yemen and planted them in the Chandragiri hills of Karnataka (south central India).

French colonisation of India began in 1673. The French purchased Chandernagore from the Mughal Governor of Bengal in 1673 and Pondicherry from the Sultan of Bijapur, the next year. Chandernagore and Pondicherry (as well as later acquisitions Karikal and Yanam on the Coromandel Coast [east], Mahé on the Malabar Coast [west] ) remained under French control until 1954.

Coffee and the French arrived in India at around the same time in the 1670s. Indian coffee culture has grown from strength to strength. The French have came and gone (in 1954) but they left behind the iconic south Indian way of brewing filter coffee.

 

Coffee plantation in Vietnam 1890s

The history of Vietnamese coffee differ slightly from the Indian one.

There was no coffee in Vietnam before French colonisation which began in 1857. French missionaries introduced coffee planting to Vietnam in the same year (1857). The first large scale coffee plantations were set up in 1888 at Ninh Bình and Quảng Bình provinces of Tonkin (northern Vietnam).

The French left Vietnam in 1954 but their legacy of coffee and drip filter (phin) still thrives and is a source of pride in Vietnam today.

The French brought their drip filter coffee pot (invented in 1795 by François Antoine Henri Descroizilles) when they colonised south India and Vietnam.

The clunky pots were neither elegant in looks nor working principle. Quaintly "unFrench". These pots worked basically along the same principles of Indian coffee filter or the Vietnamese phin, but less refined.

Ground coffee is put into the canister with the perforated base. Coffee is brewed by pouring hot water into the perforated canister and cover with the lid. Brewed coffee drips through the perforated canister i.e. filter, directly into the pot below.

Simple and somewhat crude.

Spotted these French style drip filter coffee pots at a street side coffee stall in Phnom Penh in 2022. Cambodia was part of French Indochina from 1863 till 1953 when it gained independence.

via GIPHY

The drip filter coffee pot was obsoleted by the iconic, elegant French press.

The first French press design patent was in 1852 by Messrs Henri-Otto Mayer and Jacques-Victor Delforge.

The French drip coffee pot is no longer used in most coffee shops or even homes. Most surviving ones are in museums or private collections. Fortunately, its successors the Indian drip filter and Vietnamese phin are still used in coffee shops and also in homes.

I like how curiosity about food takes me to realms I wouldn't venture into otherwise.

Written by Tony Boey on 8 Aug 2023

Brewing Vietnamese coffee

Making South Indian coffee

French drip filter pot