A clean coffee brand to cultivate your caffeine fix
Clean, high quality and Vietnamese made—these are at the core of Brim Coffee’s mission to build their brand in Vietnam. Brim Coffee has been exporting from Vietnam to the US, Australia, Europe, Korea, Japan and Taiwan since 2018 and is now focused on providing the same delicious, pure coffee beans in the country they were grown and roasted in. With a brand new bright and airy café in Saigon’s Thao Dien, beans and prepackaged phin coffee in filters available for purchase, Brim Coffee is making a splash on the local coffee scene.
Brim Coffee co-founder Dr. Tai Nguyen was in dentistry before launching his career in coffee bean export, “After I had been in the dental field for 20 years, I felt that I needed to do something more challenging and I found that coffee is an industry I would like to be in. The more you learn, the more fascinating it becomes. When I was younger, I had always wanted to own a coffee shop.” Although all their beans are grown in Vietnam, Brim began solely as an export company. Brim coffee beans are grown, harvested and processed in Cau Dat, Lam Dong Province. Then the roasting and packaging takes place in Ho Chi Minh City.
The decision to introduce the beans to their home country makes sense in today’s Vietnamese café culture, “With a population of 90 million people, and most are young, Vietnam has a huge potential. There are more young people here who like to have a clean cup of coffee that isn’t mixed with other things like corn, beans, and soybeans as people used to 30 years ago. Vietnam for the last 12 years has changed a lot. People like to enjoy clean and proper coffee,” says Dr. Tai. “Not only exporting Vietnamese coffee overseas, we would like to bring it back to Vietnam, to the place where it started, to all the people here,” adds Thao Nguyen, Managing Director.
Not only does Brim Coffee sell products for purchase, but they also seek to educate customers on their exceptional grade brews, hosting coffee tastings and workshops around the city, “We have very good, positive feedback from our guests. For example, they say, ‘the coffee tastes so nice, clean like a real coffee’, and that the smell of the coffee is very aromatic, ‘you can sense the aroma of the coffee from a distance,’” says Dr. Tai.
Understanding a customer’s preferences and helping them find their perfect coffee match is all part of the job, whether that be Italian style espresso or Vietnamese style pour over, “normally when a customer comes here, we try to express from our heart and with our bean to serve exactly what we have. We have arabica and robusta. We control from the growing to the harvest, processing, roasting and export. We don’t use any chemicals when growing the coffee tree until it goes to the cup of the customer. They can feel exactly what is in their cup. We have different styles of roast—light to medium for using in the machine, for the light one we use chemix for pour over. Each kind of coffee has a various kind of taste note,” says Thao.
Their signature take home pour over coffee filters are available for VND220,000 for a package of ten. “About the drip, normally it’s exactly like a one time phin coffee, it’s easier when you use the paper. We imported it from Japan and you know the quality is really nice. It’s easy for everybody when you don’t have time to wait. With traditional filters you have to wait five to ten minutes but with this you can have coffee in two minutes. It’s easy to travel with and is useful everywhere,” says Thao.
As far as plans for expansion, there are many, “We plan to open more coffee shops and create some more flavors. And intend to introduce Brim Coffee to Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, etc) and New Zealand,” says Dr. Tai.
With a growing international brand, Brim Coffee is working hard to not only introduce the rest of the world to superb Vietnamese coffee, but to build their own company and the entire coffee industry as a whole where it all began. Says Thao, “I myself, I would like in Vietnam to create a coffee community that means to expand green coffee to everybody, to keep everybody healthy. My wish is that Vietnamese coffee has a small part on the world map. And Brim Coffee cannot do that mission alone, we need more Vietnamese experts, Vietnamese farmers and Vietnamese roasteries, and everyone can join their hands to complete the mission.”
To try a delicious, smooth pour over coffee, your favorite Italian specialty, or pick up beans for home brewing, visit Brim Coffee’s cafe location at 222 Nguyen Van Huong in Thao Dien or their website www.brimcoffee.com.vn.
Images Courtesy of Brim Coffee Vietnam
