Coffee’s in danger: Can Vietnam’s Robusta save it from climate change?

In Vietnam, the world’s second-biggest coffee grower, producers are on an urgent quest: To rehabilitate the widely grown, but ill-regarded, Robusta bean.

Buon Ma Thuot, Vietnam – The white-walled room in a house on the outskirts of Buon Ma Thuot, Vietnam’s coffee capital, is quiet. The only thing breaking the silence is the occasional beep of an electronic scale, or the sound of coffee being poured into a measuring glass. A handful of people, all wearing white lab coats, concentrate on their work.

“This is really a lab,” says Nguyen Van Hoa, as he walks around the room in the white lab coat he wears over his jeans and trainers. A young man, Hoa calls himself a “green bean hunter” and is the owner of Stone Village Lab and Education, a company that researches and sources high-quality coffee beans for cafes and coffee businesses.

Now and then, he stops at a desk to demonstrate how many beans to add to each cup and the ideal water temperature. Baristas and cafe owners come here from all over the country to learn about coffee, from the capital Hanoi in the north to Ho Chi Minh City in the south.

He holds out a cup with a small serving of dark brown coffee brewed from a blend he has been working on for seven years. “It will change the mind of anyone who thinks that you cannot make good coffee from Robusta,” he says.

This – changing the minds of the many Robusta sceptics – is what has occupied Nguyen Van Hoa for the past few years. In the coffee industry, Robusta is known as the inferior sibling of Arabica, lacking the latter’s complexity and sweeter, smoother notes. Robusta is almost always mass-produced and cheap.