1. Introduction
Phin is a traditional coffee brewer widely used today in Việt Nam. It is dated more than a hundred years since the country once belonged to the French colony in Southeast Asia, Indochine. Before colonialism, coffee was not a native plant of Việt Nam. However, the French settlers brought the seeds from outside to cultivate across the country as part of the colonial master plan, benefiting from sought-after commodities produced in foreign lands by inexpensive labor¹.
In reality, statistics from archived documents tell us the bitter endings of the French coffee story there. At the time, Indochine provided only 0.4% of coffee imported to Le Havre — the primary European port for coffee in France². Nevertheless, with 40% of consumed coffee smuggled from Java to supply the needs by 1929, harvested beans were not enough to fulfill the settlers’ demands³. However, it was about when coffee houses sprung up over Europe, and the French expertized their customs for drinking coffee⁴. Thus, despite the colonial master plan crumbling with the disestablishment of the colony by 1946, the beans and the traditions have stayed until now. In which the phin is part of the tradition.
In this article, the phin’s designs and mechanism will be examined from the historical aspect. Views from the past and the present intertwine to help readers know their tools for today’s uses and appreciate surviving remnants of passing times.
2. On Phin
2.1. The basics of phin
Nowadays, it is easy to find phins placed next to woody and metal kitchen appliances at Asian marketplaces (Figure 1). They are commonly available in either a standard size to brew one cup or a larger size to brew several cups at once. Phins are made of either stainless steel, which matches with modern kitchen aesthetic, or aluminum of matte outlooks, cheaper to produce and lighter to carry.
Despite differences in sizes and materials, all phins share a similar design, consisting of four components placed on top of the other in the following order: (1) a lid, (2) a tamper, (3) a chamber, and (4) a chamber-holding plate. In which the tamper, the chamber, and the plate have perforated bottoms aligning with each other.
1.2. The etymology of phin
Etymologically, phin is the etymon of the French “filtre,” which means filter. However, based on the brewing technique, phin is a coffee percolator instead of a coffee filter. The common misconception between percolation and filtration is explained by William H. Ukers in All About Coffee in 1922 as follows⁵:
“Percolation and filtration are practically synonymous … Accomplishing extraction of material by permitting a liquid to pass slowly through it is, in fact, percolation, whereas filtration of the resultant extract is effected by interposing in its path some medium which will remove solid or semi-solid material from it.”
Differentiating between concepts here is not to condescend to Vietnamese’s imprecision in describing scientific phenomena linguistically. Instead, it is helpful to understand the mechanism behind the device, thus, being beneficial in tracing the history of phin within the evolution of the coffee apparatus.
1.3. The designs of phin
1.3.1. The designs of coffee brewers in France in the 19th century
When coffee was first introduced to Việt Nam around 1860, the French had been drinking the beans two centuries prior. Ancient trade routes across the Mediterranean Sea brought the beans and drinking customs from Istanbul to European attention in the early 17th century⁴⁻⁵. It took a few decades for the beans to infiltrate into and become a part of everyday life across the continent before fuelling the blossom and collision of ideas at the Age of Enlightenment⁶. At the center of the movement, the French touched every ancient cultural practice and twisted them into novel customs to fit in with the new age. The zeitgeist of the time left nothing behind, including the coffee brewing practices learned from the Turks.
For half a century, despite the emergence of different coffee cultures in other metropolitan cities, Europeans still prepared the drink in the same old way using the ibrik. Coffee grounds were boiled in water for a set of times and heated by fire. The apparatus was removed from the heat, allowing the coffee grounds to sink to the bottom. Though most of the grounds were settled by gravity, convection flows of hot water caused low-weight particles to float within the cup. The beverage was drinkable. However, the unpleasantness from floating particles was substantial.
Nevertheless, brewing by this traditional method means the coffee is over-extracted because of boiling for too long. The drinks were flat, bitter, and lack of aromas. Altogether, the desire to (1) remove as many particulates from the liquid as possible and (2) improve the cup quality became the main driving forces of changes in coffee brewing technique.
In 1710, the first innovation originated in France by introducing cloth bags to brew coffee by filtration. This technique directly overcame the drawbacks of brewing with ibrik. However, it relied heavily on the newness of the cloth. Thus, it only became popular with the invention of coffee filter paper two hundred years later. In the meantime, another French device was introduced and received utmost attention in 1800: a coffee percolator drip pot invented by De Belloy⁵.
The apparatus was made of metal, consisting of four components placed on top of each other: (1) a lid, (2) a chamber with perforated bottom, (3) a flat tamper, and (4) a server. The brewing principle of De Belloy’s is to have boiling water dripping through the ground coffee when held in suspension by a perforated metal grid. In this way, brewers obtained higher quality coffee cups with no more over-extraction. Nevertheless, it resulted in clearer cups, enhancing the appeal of quality porcelain at the time. Accordingly, it became famous not only in French but across European and their colonial regions.
1.3.2. The designs of phin
Based on the brewing principle and designs, it is rational to conclude that phin is a derivative of the original coffee percolator drip pot. The following texts highlight the contributors of these design tweaks during the timespan between the inventing date of the drip pot and the period of the French invasion of Indochine.
There are three notable design differences between the two brewers: (1) the perforated tamper in phin compared to the flat tamper in the drip pot, (2) the replacement of the coffee server in the drip pot by the chamber-holding plate in phin, and (3) material uses.
The first modification was made by Hadrot in his 1806 patent, not long after the invention of De Belloy . He introduced a tamper pierced with holes to press down and smooth out the powdered coffee uniformly. Nevertheless, the patent also introduced the concept of double walls and material changes to enhance heat preservation during the brewing process.
While the previous modification reflects functional improvements of the original design, I hypothesize that the second modification touched on the individualism ideology during the Age of Enlightenment. Instead of dripping coffee into a pot to serve around the table, coffee dripped directly into a person’s cup. Thus, the bottom of the brewing chamber was designed to fit cups of different sizes rather than fitting precisely to one pot’s mouth. There were many solutions to the requirement, and the perforated chamber-holding plate in phin was one of them.
Lastly, the translation of the L'Éveil économique de l'Indochine in April 1922 revealed the material changes from glass to aluminum were because of its convenience in traveling of settlers as follows⁷:
It is advisable for all colonials to bring this small coffee filter for one person, of a well-known model, for their travels; the too fragile glass will advantageously be replaced by an aluminum cup.
1.4. The manuals of phin
The brewing of coffee using phin follows this rudimental practice:
1. Set up the brewing in the following top-down order: a chamber, a chamber-holding plate, and the drinking cup.
2. Pour __ gram of ground coffee onto the chamber.
3. Use the tamper to press the ground coffee inside the chamber evenly.
4. Leave the tamper inside the chamber.
5. Pour __ gram of hot water over the ground coffee.
6. Allow the coffee to bloom until no drips are observable.
7. Pour __ gram of hot water over the bloomed ground coffee.
8. Close the chamber with the lid.
9. Wait for the brewed coffee to drip from the chamber to the cup.
10. Enjoy the cup.
In this manual, there are a few variables for brewers to consider when making coffee with phin toward their taste preferences. These variables are: (1) the roasting level and (2) the grinding level of the coffee beans, (3) the material and (4) the perforation designs of phin, and lastly (5) the water temperature and (6) the water-to-coffee ratio used for brewing. Among them, the first five variables often get neglected by presuming to be universal when describing how to brew with phin. Therefore, they will be examined more extensively in the next section of this article. The water-to-coffee ratio based on Vietnamese taste preferences is presented and explained now.
Vietnamese way of drinking coffee from phin inherits the traditional French coffee-making, where standards for high-quality coffee were much different from today. William H. Ukers mentioned this characteristic in 1922:
“in 1669, coffee in France was a hot black decoction of muddy grounds thickened with syrup,” then “coffee in France were almost inevitable high roast,” “… almost to a charred state, and unless the coffee is unusually bad in character, the burned taste eliminates any foreign flavor it may have….”
There, coffee was made using a percolator similar to Hadrot and De Belloy’s inventions. The coffee-to-water ratio ranges between (1: 3.5) to (1: 4). Although the chamber volume in the original designs was the same size as the pot rather than a cup-like phin, nevertheless, the ratio has stayed since 1806 until today.
In the demonstration video below, I brewed on phin with a ratio of 20g coffee to 100g water. Beans were ground into medium coarse size instead of an extra fine. The video’s filtering process lasts about 2 minutes, and fines accumulate in the bottom of the resulting cup. The video here is an example of how one makes coffee with phin, rather thanan ultimate way to brew coffee with it. Although it was done for demonstration, it can be used as video proof to criticize the phin in the following section.
3. Criticism of phin
Nowadays, coffee filtration has become popular with the release of new modifications every year. Meanwhile, the coffee percolator like phin becomes the ibrik of the Age of Information and is categorized with the tag of local or traditional instead of global practice. This unappealing situation of phin is emphasized in its stagnant development, felt among the producers and brewers.
Accordingly, criticisms of its innate characteristics become inevitable when examining the hundred-year-old device under binoculars of modern sciences, technology and taste preferences. In this section, criticisms of the material used, the designs, and the manuals of phin will be presented concerning the development of phin towards a progressive and sustainable future.
3.1. On the materials
The water temperature relates directly to the extraction of flavors from the coffee grounds during coffee brewing. This causal relationship is essential in its existence rather than a set of rules. One can consider it as the lay ground to interpret the complexity of flavor molecules in every brew based on different beans and the heat transfer mechanisms occurred during brewing. Regarding the father design of phin, drip pot innovators emphasized the relationship in preserving heat in the brewing chamber in their early patents.
The chamber in Hadrot’s 1806 was made of bismuth instead of tin in the De Belloy’s. Bismuth (k = 8 W/(m·K)) has much lower thermal conductivity than tin (67 W/(m·K)). Thus, there was less heat loss from brewing water to the chamber wall while making coffee. As a result of this factor alone, coffee brewed from the two devices would yield different taste profiles to the keen eyes.
As said earlier, the stagnation in phin development is unbecoming, leaving consumers with a century-old design and a small selection of stainless steel and aluminum materials. Stainless steel preserve heat better than aluminum with its lower thermal conductivity. Given identical phin designs, initial water temperature prepared for brewing, and coffee grounds sizing, one is expected to taste coffee of low temperature dripped from the aluminum phin.
On the other hand, the reaction between aluminum and hot water has been known for releasing aluminum ions into the water. However, this reaction also occurs with stainless steel at a much lower degree. Though the level of these ions is low enough to consume without health concerns, they change the sensory profile of the cups toward higher acidity ends regardless of the roasting levels of the beans, especially in the case of aluminum⁸ (?).
3.2. On the designs
Regarding the functional design of phin in a modern context, I believe the phin’s chamber holding plate is obsolete. Hypothetically, it was designed to function as (1) the holder of the brewing chamber above the personal drinking cup and (2) the extension of the chamber’s bottom to fit the dimension of any cups at the time.
In the traditional way of preparing coffee, beans were grounded very fine. The perforated plate became a filter layer to obtain a more apparent coffee cup while awaiting the filter paper’s arrival. In this way, phin is roughly a coffee filter apparatus. However, the perforated hole dimensions at the bottom of the phin’s chamber are still wide enough to allow coffee particles to pass through. Nevertheless, the perforation patterns on the chamber’s base and the plate holder are identical. Alignment of the two instead creates a bypass than a roadblock in the filtration system. Therefore, phin should still be regarded as a coffee percolator in the evolution of coffee-making apparatus.
Nowadays, there is a growing number of coffee brewers with high-precision coffee grinders. Thus, the coffee grind size used for brewing with phin is no longer one size passes all but is becoming a feasible variable to experiment with. Subsequently, beans could be grounded tiny enough for brewing tasty cup yet big enough not to pass through the perforated holes.
An example is making coffee with an espresso machine, where beans are grounded fine, yet no particles drop into the shot cup. For this reason, the subsequent phin development would consider this aspect during the designing process. Prospectively, the modern phin design is expected to have the following characteristic:
1. A phin consists of a chamber and a lid.
2. The chamber bottom is perforated with tiny gaps that coffee grounds cannot bypass.
3. The perforated gaps are evenly distributed, permitting even drip.
4. The chamber has an extension that shares the holding plate's functions.
5. The total volume is divisible by 5, allowing a water-to-coffee ratio of 1:4.
6. A phin is made of low-heat conductivity metal, i.e., stainless steel.
7. A phin becomes a coffee filter.
3. Conclusions
Phin is a traditional Vietnamese coffee maker that belongs to a coffee culture existing for more than a century. It is a derivative of the coffee percolator — the original French drip pot that, hypothetically, the colony brought together with their dark coffee custom to Việt Nam in the late 19th century.
Since most of the developments in coffee brewers were made in European society and the emergence of the coffee filter after the invention of coffee filter paper, the story of phin and other percolators became stagnant. The design of phin has been the same throughout the years, ignoring the advancement in production technology in the last hundred years and the modern way of brewing coffee.
In this article, the history and fundamentals of phin designs have been presented in detail, allowing future criticisms for developments of the device. It also provides manuals for curious persons to understand the device before exploring the new sensory realms. Altogether, it can be considered as the grounds for discussing whether phin would stay in the “traditional” lane or move forward to keep on its name without any attached adjective word.
4. References
Dat, N. T. On the Origins of a Coffee Plantation in Vietnam. 2022 2022, 7.
Société agricole du Kontum (1925-1933) création de la SICAF. Entrep.-Colon. 2022, 26.
Société Agricole Du Nord-Annam (SANA) (1929-1943). Entrep.-Colon. 2020.
Ellis, M. The Coffee-House: A Cultural History; Weidenfeld & Nicolson: London, 2004.
Ukers, W. H. All about Coffee, 2d ed.; Gale Research: Detroit, 1935.
Matthew, W. The Enlightenment. 2018.
H, C. L’Éveil économique de l’Indochine : bulletin hebdomadaire. LÉveil Économique Indoch. Bull. Hebd. 1922, No. 252, 10.
Al Juhaiman, L. A. Estimating Aluminum Leaching from Aluminum Cook Wares in Different Meat Extracts and Milk. J. Saudi Chem. Soc. 2010, 14 (1), 131–137. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jscs.2009.12.020.
5. Extras
5.1. Mentions of phin in Vietnamese literature (?)
OCR searches for “phin cà phê” in the digital archive of National Libary returns that the first mention of “phin” in Vietnamese literature was in 1952. It was in the first novel of Triều Đẩu — Tranh tối tranh sáng. Nowadays, not everybody knows about Triều Đẩu, and finding information about the author is challenging. However, thanks to the meticulous works of Nhị Linh, we learned that the author was known for painting the everyday life of a Hanoian vividly in the 1950s. In chapter 8 of his novel, he described:
… The coffee movement has spread beyond the North. Here, coffee has been popular among all classes of people … There are cups of coffee brewed by phin or by way of large kettle - - in restaurants, phở or western shops … Phin was placed in front of Đại and the dark brown liquid had already begun to drip to the bottom of the cup. A fragrant, seductive, familiar, indescribable flavor exuded. Around him, the guests enjoying themselves — mostly young people who were very cringe and dumb — also each had a draw in front of them. The price of each phin is only 3 silver coins, so who can't have it! ….
— translated by google
I am uncertain whether this was the first mention of phin in our literature. Nevertheless, the above evidence illustrates the coffee culture in Vietnam a while ago!
Acknowledgements
I was motivated to do this study after my impromptu presentation at Swedish Specialty Coffee Camp in October 2022. There, I demonstrated brewing coffee with phin, and shared my experience drinking coffee in Vietnam. Thanks to the listening crowd — now I could only recall Håkan, Amanda, Per, Leo, Philip, Mike, Julia, Fredrik & Fredrik —I realized the missing connections in history.
I also want to thank Barro for retouching beautiful thumbnail that you may see before reading the post.