How Coffee Came to Vietnam

In a nursery, a tiny white sprout is pushing out of a coffee seed. Through all its days of sprouting, the seed has been kept moist. The grower has been waiting for just this moment. Only when the white sprout peeps out are the seeds carried out to the bed.

The bed was made ready beforehand. Its soil is fine and smooth, and its surface has been leveled until it is perfectly flat. One by one, the seeds are laid down, each in a spot of its own, none resting on top of another. Last of all, a thin layer of soil is sprinkled over them.

From that day on, the bed is watered gently every day with a watering can. The water slips through tiny holes and falls lightly, like a fine drizzle. Some growers use a small sprinkler head with fine holes, and the water falls just as softly. No one pours it on hard. Day after day, the thin layer of soil on the bed soaks up the water.

In Vietnam today, sowing coffee seeds is familiar work for a great many growers. Yet there was a time when not a single coffee plant grew anywhere in this land. The coffee plant's first home lies in Africa, a long way from Vietnam, on the other side of wide seas. It had to cross the sea to reach Vietnamese soil.

In the 19th century, the coffee plant set foot in Vietnam. According to researchers, the first plants were brought over by a number of French priests. The first visitor to arrive was a variety the Vietnamese call cà phê chè.

In the Vietnam of that time, coffee was still a strange new plant. Growers took cà phê chè and planted it on trial in many regions. In the north, it went into the ground in Hà Nam and Thanh Hóa. Then the trials ran down the long central strip of the country, as far as Quảng Trị. The stranger was even taken up to the Central Highlands for a trial, and into the southeast of the country as well.

Wherever it went, cà phê chè could grow, but it bore little fruit. Part of the reason was that once the trees were planted, they were left to grow on their own, and hardly anyone tended them. Part of it was that pests and disease did heavy damage. There was a small grub that bored deep inside the trunk. There was also leaf rust, a disease that ruined the leaves.

On the underside of a sick leaf, small yellow spots appear, and over time they become a layer of orange powder. Then the leaf withers, dries up and falls. Trees died off in great numbers. In those days, cà phê chè barely hung on, and it could not spread.

Early in the 20th century, the French brought over two more kinds of coffee. They were cà phê vối and cà phê mít. These two later visitors stood up to drought better, and they fought off disease better as well. Together with the earlier cà phê chè, Vietnam now had all three varieties.

Around that same time, the French opened plantations, large estates for growing coffee. The plantations began in places such as Phủ Quỳ, in Nghệ An. From there they slowly spread up into the Central Highlands, as far as Buôn Ma Thuột.

Cà phê mít, for its part, was also carried up to the red basalt soil of western Quảng Trị. There it was sown from seed, and the trees shot up tall. Some elders of the Bru Vân Kiều people once said they remembered those years. Back then, they said, this coffee grew all over Khe Sanh, in Hướng Hóa.

As for cà phê vối, it was like a traveler who at last found a home. The Central Highlands became its new homeland. On those red basalt plateaus, it grew stronger and better than anywhere else in Vietnam. The climate here suited the tree, and so did the soil. But above all, cà phê vối had the people of the Central Highlands to care for it. Today, most of the coffee gardens in the whole country lie in the Central Highlands.

Cà phê chè, the earliest visitor, also found a place of its own in the end. Today, this variety grows mainly in the northwest of the country and in Lâm Đồng, with a scattering in a few central provinces.

The first plants had to cross the sea to get here. Today, Vietnam ranks second in the world for growing coffee and for selling it abroad.

In the Central Highlands today, after a dry spell, small flower buds have formed on the branches. Only then do the growers water their gardens, and the whole garden blooms almost all at once.

After the Lunar New Year, coffee flowers turn the hillsides of the Central Highlands white. Their scent is sweet and strong, and it drifts everywhere. Bees come flocking in, humming around the rows of white blossoms. The flowers last only a few days before they fade, so the trees can set fruit. In honey season, beekeepers in Đắk Lắk collect a honey that carries the scent of coffee flowers.

The fruit sets almost all at once, too. When it first appears on the branch, it is a deep green. As it ripens, it turns yellow. Once it is fully ripe, it is a bright red.

Inside a fruit there are usually two small seeds, each a slender oval. Each seed has one flat face turned inward, and the two seeds lie snugly side by side. Running along the length of each seed is a small groove. Some fruits hold just one round seed, which people call cà phê culi.

The seed with the white sprout, back in the nursery, once lay inside a fruit just like this.

The end of the year is picking season in Đắk Lắk. The pickers try to wait until most of the fruit on the tree is ripe. Then they strip the branches of their ripe red fruit. One household goes over to help another with the picking, and then the second household comes to help in turn. Relatives and neighbors keep trading their labor this way. The drying yards have been cleared and made ready, waiting for the coffee fruit to come in from the gardens.

Far to the north lies Quảng Trị, one of the places where cà phê chè was tried in the early days, soon after the plant arrived. Back then, on those trial grounds, the leaves of cà phê chè were speckled with yellow spots from leaf rust. Then they withered, dried up and fell.

Today, people grow a great deal of this coffee in Hướng Hóa, in western Quảng Trị. The variety planted more and more widely here can stand up to leaf rust. The coffee gardens in this area are usually not watered, so the trees flower by the rain alone. When the rain comes to a hill, the cà phê chè on that hill breaks into white flowers.