>Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2002 16:28:02 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Dennis Robert Redmond
>Subject: Re: Anniversary
>On Sun, 15 Sep 2002, Brad DeLong wrote:
> Plus they seem to have had a truly
> vicious strain of anti-Chinese descent ethnic hatred.
>Re the Chinese thing: it's this 1,000 year history of >successive
murderous
>invasions, whose latest round was a little skirmish in >1979. Nothing
>you Americans would understand.
Dennis mate that's pretty freaking ignorant. The Chinese speaking community in Vietnam are Vietnamese, not Chinese; they have roots in the country going back hundreds of years. To identify them with the Chinese state's invasions of Vietnam is a move which you would recognise for what it was if anyone tried to pull it in the US.
I disagree with Brad however, that the Vietnamese communist party *did* have "a truly vicious strain of ethnic hatred" and would be interested in any evidence to this effect; particularly in any evidence that it was vicious by the standards of Malaysia and Indonesia.
[and on to the main event] ------------------------------
>Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2002 19:32:37 -0400
>From: Doug Henwood
>Subject: Re: Anniversary
>The guy who runs the very good coffee bar in this
>building (In the Black, 180 Varick St), who is to put it
>kindly quite single-minded in his devotion to coffee,
>says Vietnamese coffee sucks - that it's displacing Latin
>American beans in supermarket brews, but he doesn't
>have any. Is he wrong?
Me and Michael Pollak sorted this one out the year before last I think. [ahem]
There is Vietnamese coffee and Vietnamese coffee ...
The raw material of Dennis' kick-ass coffee is actually pretty rough stuff. The majority of Vietnam's output is "low-grade arabica" which they flog off to the instant coffee trade under a couple of massive contracts. It tastes of coffee, but that's about it. Your mate is right that the Vietnamese government's can-do attitude to agriculture has been responsible for all sorts of trouble for the Latin Americans, and that the coffee they displace is generally of a better standard than Vietnamese coffee itself.
However ....
As with most agricultural products, a lot depends on the way it's prepared. For their domestic consumption, the Vietnamese roast their coffee in a very particular way ... somebody told me that they roast it in butter; I don't know enough about coffee to know whether it's practical to do that, but the beans do have a pretty unusual, greasy feel to them. The end product is sensational. I don't even really like coffee (I just drink it because I'm addicted to the taste of PVC in the plastic cups) but I was drinking it all the time over there. If Dennis has managed to get some of these coffee beans imported, then he's probably drinking a very nice cup of coffee indeed. Your guy should try them.
A friend of a friend is over there at the moment with a small project aimed at helping the Vietnamese to grow some of the higher-margin robusta beans in a less industrial manner, so Vietnamese gourment coffee may be an evolving market ....
dd
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