The Quest to Make the Best Worst Cup of Coffee
My first glass of black, undiluted, pure robusta was a punch in the neck. It was 2,000-proof vodka plus caffeine. It made me want to dive, open-mouthed, into a swimming pool filled with sweet cream. This was nothing like the other wimpy thing called “coffee” I’d spent my entire life drinking, and at some primitive, sensory level, I struggled to process it. But I controlled my expression because Bang Duong, the man who’d grown and roasted and brewed this Thorlike drink, was seated right across from me. It was January 2020, and we were on the second floor of Ho Chi Minh City’s Tractor Coffee, a mecca of reclaimed wood, unfinished steel, and burlap tones that wouldn’t be out of place in Berkeley or Berlin save for one thing: Tractor was one of the only cafés I could find that made seed-to-cup coffee from the world’s least loved variety of bean. That could make it the staging ground for a far-fetched culinary revolution.
In the world of elite coffee, promoters of robusta beans—long known as a cheap, low-grade filler crop that goes into instant grounds—are viewed with either condescension or distrust, as though they’re peddling prom corsages made from highway weeds. Indeed, eight years earlier, Duong had been just another farmer in Bao Loc growing the rough stuff—low-grade robusta used in street coffee. But unlike many cash-croppers, he was less interested in short-term gains. He respected robusta and didn’t believe that there was anything inherently bad about its taste. , he told himself. And
