It has been a while since I wrote about coffee and cafes but now I am back just because I am reunited with my coffee tools. Among all the coffee filter tools that I have, my favorite lately has been the phin, a Vietnamese coffee filter tool that traditionally has 4 parts. My phin has 3 parts because the bottom filter is already attached to the main part. Brewing with phin is quite fun and it does not take longer than 10 minutes. The coffee produced is also great for a single serving coffee.

Phin is an accessible coffee tool with a reasonable price. If you want the quality of v60 but want to keep it simple, I would suggest getting a phin. The techniques are not complicated and you can master it quite easily. One of the coffee you can make is something called, *Cà Phê Đen Đá*, or iced black coffee is just coffee grounds, water and obviously the phin. But before I show you how to make that, there are some variants of Vietnamese coffee that you might have tried or might not have tried.

Vietnamese Coffee

In Indonesia itself, Vietnamese coffee is pretty common to find. It can be found anywhere and the common one is cà phê sữa đá, which is coffee with condensed milk and coffee on top. If you order Vietnamese coffee, that is what you will find in Indonesia. The best place i know that serves amazing vietnamese coffee ( cà phê sữa đá)is a place called Hoi An by Me Vui in Canggu. I find that Vietnamese coffee is similar to Indonesian coffee, where they also have egg coffee. That menu is not commonly found in cafes in Indonesia but I read on Hive, cha phe trung is served at the cafe in vietnam. I personally have tried egg coffee but I find it a bit revolting and I have not drank it since. Now, in this post I am talking about making a basic Cà Phê Đen Đá, iced black coffee.

Brewing Coffee With Phin

The best way to make phin is using freshly grinded coffee but if you don’t have it, that’s fine too. This time, I use espresso dark roast from Starbucks which I grind for v60 but slightly finer. I don’t recommend grinding it too fine because I tried this and the coffee grounds got into the cup. After you get the grounds, the amount of coffee grounds will depend on your preference.

Do you want to be alert or just a smooth coffee experience? If you have high tolerance to caffeine, I can suggest 6 teaspoons of coffee to make it equal to double espresso. But if you don’t have a high tolerance to it, 2 teaspoons of coffee is enough. Then comes the water, with filter coffee, I only use filtered water or bottled water. Water is so important in the brewing process that I even find some roasters selling water that is best/ideal for coffee. But without further adieu, below is the bullet version of the things you need to brew Cà Phê Đen Đá.

Things you need

• 2-3 teaspoon of medium coarse or medium coffee ground
• Filtered water
• Phin filter

How to make Cà Phê Đen Đá

• Put the coffee ground inside the phin filter, cover it with the 2nd part of the filter.
• Pour hot water about 1 cm to release the gas and let the coffee blooms for about 1 minute
• Pour more water and cover with the lid.
• Wait until the coffee finished filtering
• Add Iced on your preference.
• If you think the coffee is too strong, add water to it.

Vietnamese coffee is great to have in the morning. It is quite strong and provides a significant amount of caffeine. Brewing with phin also saves time and hassle free. Even if you are not geeking out, you can make a great coffee with it. You can get creative with it or keep it traditional by adding condensed milk. When I get creative, I usually add lemon juice and sparkling water to make something similar to sparkling americano. I’ll get to that part at some point where I’d be making some sparkling coffee recipes.

More visuals

Fun fact, the coffee that I brewed above has 12 teaspoon of coffee which is quite significant. So, if you like something strong, you can try that with that amount. Also, more reference and the vietnamese word I found are from here vietnamese coffee. See you in my next brewing ideas.