Vietnamese drip coffee - Ca phe phin:

My coffee-aficionado friend has had plenty of ca phe sua da or Vietnamese iced coffee before, but he was particularly intrigued with this old-school method of using a phin or metal coffee filter for ca phe phin, Vietnamese drip coffee. You can find it at restaurants in Little Saigon but they're increasingly switching over to pre-made iced coffees. It's really easy to do it yourself at home, just takes a bit o' patience.


You can buy the phin or metal filter at most Little Saigon supermarkets for under $3.

It comes with three pieces, clockwise, from left to right: The filter, the lid and the press (the flat disc with a metal rod coming out of it).

First, pour some condensed milk into a glass. Pick a clear glass if you're a nerd like me and like watching the coffee action. I usually go with several tablespoons as it helps to cut the super potent and dark roast Vietnamese coffee, but you can always add more later.

You can also pick up a bag of dark roast coffee grounds at most Vietnamese markets, typically at the cash register. My folks go to Vien Dong Supermarket in Garden Grove for their ca phe. About $5 a bag.

Put a kettle of water on to boil. Then, before you put the coffee grounds into the filter, be sure to take out the press. Add a few spoonfuls of coffee grounds into the filter until it's almost halfway full for a strong serving. (Or roughly three teaspoons.) Place the press back into the filter and screw the rod back into place if need be. (Erik did a great job his first time -- betcha thought those large hands were mine, huh?)

Then pour the boiling water into the filter to the top. Cover with the lid and wait about 15 minutes or so.

The coffee will start drip, drip, dripping ... be patient ... after the water goes down, you'll likely want to add one more round of hot water.

Then you just stir up the condensed milk and coffee together and either drink it hot or add ice. And some more condensed milk if need be. Enjoy! your delightful cup of Vietnamese Coffee

Taken from

World rarest and unique Coffee brew - Cold Brew Coffee

The notion of cold-brewed coffee sounded to us, frankly, weird, to most people, brewing coffee minus the heat is quite impossible
After all, heat seems intrinsic to the coffee process. Why would you possibly want to leave grounds soaking for half a day in an ugly plastic pitcher, like so much Kool-Aid? There's only one possible reason we were willing to try the Toddy coffee system, one of a handful of cold-brew options available: It works.

In the beginning
The idea of commercializing the method of brewing coffee without the heat or cold brewing came from a chemical engineer, Todd Simpson. It is said that in 1964 he got the idea in a small café in Guatemala. This is when he received a small flask of cool concentrate and some boiling water upon ordering. This makes him wonder whether his mother, who couldn't stomach coffee, might be able to enjoy the cold coffee instead. Eventually his mother could and this leads him to develop the cold brewing device known as the “Toddy system” which is being commercialized now.
Todd Simpson believes that it may be an ancient Peruvian method, and coffee concentrates first showed up in 19th-century America. Another theory traces it back to Java. However, nobody knows for sure where cold coffee brewing method came from.
No heat, no plug
It's not an immediately comfortable transition. The technology is profoundly low-tech: a plastic pitcher with a fabric filter, sitting atop a carafe that catches the finished product. No electricity needed, just gravity, a pound of ground beans and nine cups of cold water. That and 10 to 12 hours steeping time.
It is said that the coffee produced through this method is less acidic, less caffeine and also friendly to sensitive stomach. Toddy claims to brew up two-thirds less caffeine than regular coffee; in a side-by side test using Starbucks' regular blend, the Toddy version had a pH of 6.31 and 40 mg of caffeine per 100 grams of coffee, while Starbucks store-brewed clocked in at a pH of 5.48 and 61 mg of caffeine. (Lower numbers on the pH scale, which is measured logarithmically, denote more acid.)