Drinking coffee at The Yellow Chair

The owner of the Yellow Chair is welcoming customers with a smile, her name is Kim Hanh. She is taking them to coffee bar and and says: “You will roast, grind and make your own coffee.”

Within the past few years, the traditional coffee drink type, that is “sticky-dense-intense”, is gradually replaced by the coffee shops which attract passing-by customers by the smell of coffee in the wind, making them stop by to go in for a drink, or even awakened just by the smell of it.

Across the country nowadays, when craving for coffee, follow the smell that comes from the coffee shops. Once sitting down, the waiter asks: “Would you like pure coffee or sticky coffee?” It turns out that coffee-holics do not have to make any effort searching for a pure coffee drink without the bitter taste from tons of additives.

Last Sunday evening was quite special a day since it was the day of Earth Hour, I was invited for a coffee drink. “It must be a street coffee shop again”, I thought  to myself. But my friend took me to luxury coffee house named Yellow Chair. “This is a coffee house owned by a Korean-Vietnamese married couple, initially successful with a kimchi brand. When the Vietnamese wife asked her Korean husband to go back to the forests to grow coffee, he agreed at once. They left behind the kimchi brand for others and begin to search for quality coffee”, he introduced to me.

Ms. Kim Hanh, the owner of the Yellow Chair, was welcoming customers with a smile on her face. She took them to the bar and said that they could roast, grind the beans and make their own coffee drink, then the baristas there would use the same ingredients to make another drink. With the same coffee beans, but concocted by different methods, the drinks produced have different tastes, but it has to be Specialty Coffee because only it has the lightest subtlety to make a difference in tastes.

It is no doubt I am familiar with the job for I have been drinking coffee since I was very young. At the moment I have two kinds of coffee bean grinders. The first one is manual and it has the capacity for one cup of coffee. The other one is a coffee bean grinding machine and it can grind a few taels of beans each use, enough for a whole week. Use them up before grinding new ones because the ground coffee beans lose their taste and smell if stored for too long.

A barista taught me to grind with a machine from the coffee shop, up to your consumption. Then I brewed my own coffee in a traditional way. Using “the phin”, I poured boiling water in and put on the lid. The barista did it in a slightly different way. After putting the coffee into the phin, he poured about 40 ml of boiling water in and waited for it to bloom for 10 sec, without closing the lid, he continued to pour in another 40 ml of water, he said, “With 20 mg of ground coffee, you pour in 40 ml of boiling water for it to bloom, the other 40 ml of water you pour after will push the previous 40 ml of the water to drift down, carrying the essence of coffee with it. This glass of coffee has a good smell and taste to it, along with the light bitterness or sourness, depending on the types of coffee beans you use. But good coffee always has a sweet aftertaste.

We were enjoying the coffee that the barista made while he was drinking ours. Obviously I had tasted our coffee glass before. There was a difference indeed. And it is up to your taste too. Since I often drink coffee, sometimes I drink three or even four cups a day so I made it a little bit bland, whereas the barista made it up to the standards, so it tasted full and rich. But with this quality, I can only drink two cups a day.

At the end of the day, I had a Cold Brew glass of coffee, the one that is currently very popular among the office workers, because it requires good and pure coffee that similar to the type of coffee from the Yellow Chair - Specialty Coffee, a rated coffee type ( according to the world’s coffee ranking). There is no word to describe it other than exotic and delicious.

“The selection of Specialty coffee requires a team of qualified and highly experienced people to taste and roast, the barista team must be classically trained based on the standards of processing, roasting of Specialty Coffee Association (SCA). After choosing the coffee farms that meet the requirements, the farmers will pick, pre-process and preserve coffee in accordance with the process, coffee beans have to be roasted with the right method and by experienced person with raw beans. For Specialty coffee, the tasting score has to be over 80”, the owner said.

Sophisticated as it is, a cup of coffee here costs only 45,000vnd. There are about 20 customers in Yellow Chair on Sunday nights.

Source: http://thegioihoinhap.vn/nong-nghiep-4-0/khoi-nghiep/uong-ca-phe-o-yellow-chair/