Coffee Taste-Off

Indonesia, Vietnam, Australia – all of these travel destinations turned out to have “coffee value” as six of us traveling coffee aficionados learned. Returning from our respective holiday get-aways we all met up for a coffee taste-off!

Show me what you got!

As the host of this bizarre coffee party we offered our impressive inventory of coffee brewing devices and support equipment. We are the proud owners of:

• Filter drip coffee maker
• Espresso maker
• French Press
• “Phin” filter (a Vietnamese flat bottom tin filter)
• One cup stove top "Moka"
• Mill grinder (Much better than a blade grinder, so they say.)
• Mortar & pestle

Needles to say, it took us longer to decide which brewing method to use than to actually enjoy our brew!

We brought various coffees from Indonesia worrying we might need to declare them entering the Philippines. We have a precious collection of coffee from Bali, Sulawesi, and Sumatra. And, of course, the infamous Kopi Luwak. Yes, the coffee that civet cats poop out.

The Vietnamese coffee culture was represented by the good old Trung Nguyen coffee, which uses “Arabica, Robusta, Chari (Excelsa), Catimor, Liberica and other diverse varieties”. Special or weird, depending on your taste and point of view, is that the beans are traditionally “roasted in clarified butter to complement and enhance the effect of the natural oils that are released by the beans in the roasting process”.

Australia grows Arabica coffee! Given 'Down Under's' low altitude and Arabica's need for higher elevations (around 800m+) this actually surprised me. Whether or not the coffee from Adeleide was locally grown the label didn't reveal.

We started off with Balinese coffee trying to revive the holiday experience our palates associate with the strong coffee the Balinese call 'instant'. The roasted coffee beans are powdery fine (usually pounded due to lack of grinders), and hot water simply added (no need for a filter system). In Bali we learned quickly to not stir our coffee but to let the grounds settle. They leave a thick coffee mud behind in the coffee cup!

Going Balinese we crushed and pounded the coffee beans with mortar and pestle. However, the grounds were too coarse and floated! We spend 5 minutes fishing coffee grounds out of our mugs. We drank our coffee tight lipped to avoid swallowing any bean remains. While the coffee tasted great, drinking it was quite laborious.

We were smarter preparing the Sulawesi coffee. We first ground the beans in our mill grinder. Then Glenn worked on them with mortar and pestle to get a yet finer grind. We used the typical Vietnamese Phin Filter, a metal filter sitting on top of a cup, to prepare the Sulawesi coffee. A cross-cultural experience for the coffee and the filter! Filtering the Sulawesi, just as it was served to us in Bali using paper filter, proved to be a worthy technique. The coffee came out mild yet full in taste!

If it is the butter-roasting or not, the Vietnamese coffee has a rather mild, less acidy taste. We Phin-filtered the already super fine grounds to achieve perfection. The Nung Truyng website recommends the filtering process to take 4-6minutes. Our coffee definitely dripped faster. Which means we either used too little coffee or didn’t peck it well enough. Next time we’ll moisten the pecked coffee first to swell it before tossing hot water on top.

For maximum use of equipment we finally used our French Press for the Australian coffee. Before we ground the beans I noticed how “clean” the batch was. No broken beans, hardly any parchment remains. Just evenly sized glossy black coffee beans. I’d say they did a nice job sorting the beans!

The French Press starts to become my favorite coffee maker. I like to watch the coffee grounds swell and rise to the top when doused in water. Then they eventually settle down. Any lingering grounds are moved to the bottom of the brew leaving a clean cup to enjoy! The Adelaide coffee though roasted rather dark, came out great!