There’s a particular kind of quiet that only exists at the start of the day, before the messages and the meetings — the few minutes it takes to make a cup of coffee by hand. I could buy it faster somewhere else. That’s not the point. The point is the ritual: the same small sequence of steps, every morning, that turns a fistful of raw green beans into something worth slowing down for.
This is how my morning coffee actually happens, from the bag of green beans on the shelf to the first sip.
Starting with green beans
Most people start with roasted coffee. I start one step earlier — with green beans, unroasted, which keep for months without going stale the way roasted coffee does within weeks.
TODO(ngockhoi96): where you buy your green beans, which origin/varietal you favour, and why you went down the home-roasting path instead of buying roasted.
Roasting at home
Roasting is the step that looks intimidating and turns out to be mostly about listening. As the beans heat, they crack — an audible “first crack” like popcorn — and the window between that crack and the roast level you want is where all the decisions live.
TODO(ngockhoi96): your roasting setup (pan? popcorn maker? dedicated roaster?), how long it takes, and how dark you take it for phin specifically.
I let the beans rest a day or two after roasting. Coffee degasses CO₂ right after the roast, and brewing too soon makes for an uneven, gassy cup.
Brewing in the phin
The phin is the traditional Vietnamese filter: a small metal cup that sits on top of your glass, with a perforated press that holds the grounds. No paper, no electricity, no timer — just gravity and patience.
My sequence, every morning:
- Boil water and let it settle off the boil for a moment.
- Add the ground coffee to the phin — a medium-coarse grind.
- Pour a splash of water to let the grounds bloom, and wait ~30 seconds.
- Fill the phin, set the lid, and let it drip. Slowly. This is the part you don’t rush.
- The full drip takes around four to five minutes. Watching it is half the ritual.
TODO(ngockhoi96): your exact ratio (grams of coffee to ml of water), grind setting, and whether you drink it black, with condensed milk (cà phê sữa), or over ice (cà phê sữa đá).
Why bother
It would be entirely reasonable to ask why I do all this when a machine could hand me coffee in thirty seconds. The honest answer is that the inefficiency is the feature. The four minutes the phin takes to drip are four minutes I’m not doing anything else — not optimising, not producing, just waiting for coffee. In a life that rewards speed everywhere else, a deliberately slow ritual is a small act of resistance.
TODO(ngockhoi96): close with what this ritual actually means to you — what it sets up for the rest of your day, or what it reminds you of.
The cup is good. The few quiet minutes are better.
