Coffee That Travelled Less Than You Did

For most of the last century the good coffee left. Beans grown in Da Lat, Yirgacheffe or Antioquia were graded, bagged and shipped to be roasted somewhere colder and sold back at a markup. What has quietly changed is that the roasting moved. There are now serious roasters within a morning's drive of the farms, and the coffee they sell locally is often the best of the crop rather than what did not make export grade.

Ask two questions, ignore the rest

You do not need the tasting vocabulary. Ask when it was roasted — anything inside three weeks is fine, anything without a date on the bag is a bad sign. Then ask what they would drink from the menu today. A shop that can answer the second question quickly is a shop that tastes its own coffee every morning.

Everything else is preference. Filter is not more sophisticated than espresso, light roast is not more honest than dark, and the person telling you otherwise is selling something. The only real mistake is stale.

The condensed milk question

In Vietnam the argument about whether sweetened condensed milk belongs in coffee has been settled for seventy years, and the answer is yes. It exists because fresh milk did not keep, and it stayed because the combination is genuinely good — the robusta is built for it, bitter and heavy enough to survive the sugar. Ordering it black to seem serious is the tourist move.