At what point does the pursuit of marginal improvements in AI capabilities outweigh the financial and ethical considerations involved in such projects? Any ideas how to balance innovation and cost?
Curious how this this discovery could inspire cross-disciplinary innovations, particularly in areas like bioinformatics or space exploration, where power efficiency is crucial
This story is such a cool example of how rewilding can really work. Turning the land from intensive farming into a more natural space gave the storks exactly what they needed to thrive—and it’s amazing to see them breeding there for the first time in centuries!
It makes me wonder what other places could do if they rethought how land is used. Projects like this don’t just help wildlife but also bring life and energy back to these areas. Plus, it’s such a great blend of preserving history and building something new for the future. Would love to see more efforts like this popping up around the world.
This was such a fascinating read—it really resonated with me. A few years ago, my girlfriend and I started a small coffee shop in Hanoi as a fun side project, and I was struck by the parallels between Vietnam's coffee history and the issues you outline here about Kenya.
Vietnam, like Kenya, emerged from a coffee industry shaped by colonial-era inequities. Yet through reforms, robust state support for smallholder farmers, and a focus on infrastructure, Vietnam has positioned itself as a global coffee powerhouse. While the initial focus on robusta was quantity-driven, there’s now a shift toward quality, which is helping Vietnamese coffee expand into new markets.
Kenya’s situation feels similar yet distinct. It has an unparalleled coffee heritage, and with thoughtful reforms—empowering smallholders, encouraging direct trade, and finding the right balance between quality and disease-resistant hybrids—it could reclaim its standing on the global stage.
The article beautifully captures the systemic challenges and the hope for transformation. I really believe Kenya’s coffee can rise again, stronger and fairer, just as Vietnam is starting to do. It’s inspiring to see how coffee connects people and places across the world in such unique ways!
It was the DDR who developed the modern Vietnamese coffee industry, collapsing before it could benefit.
Beginning in 1975, largely parallel with the coffee crisis in East Germany, the production of Robusta coffee began in Vietnam. Robusta plants grow faster, contain more caffeine, suit the climate of the Vietnamese Central Highlands, and lend themselves better to mechanized harvesting.
My in-laws were part of the generation of displaced Vietnamese who were resettled in the Central Highlands for coffee cultivation back in the 70s-90s, but this mass migration of ethnic Vietnamese pissed off the indigenous Jarai and other Hmong+Khmer ethnic groups, which led to a sustained insurgency and a lot of horrid human rights abuses.
The current GenSec of Vietnam (To Lam) is notable for his career as the butcher of Gia Lai during his tenure there as part of the MPS.
The standard insight is there's a difference between liking coffee, liking hanging out in a coffee shop, and running a coffee shop. Running a coffee shop is 98% HR, accounting, and customer service, and 2% coffee.
Youre right. The interesting things we learned came from visiting dozens of local producers, farmers, and villages where coffee has it roots around Vietnam. Have you had a chance to visit Vietnam and sample the egg coffee?
Coffee Machine, Right-hand Dispenser—The dispenser in all coffee
machines at Valve that holds the decaffeinated coffee beans. To the best of
our knowledge, these have never needed to be refilled. For all we know, the
beans are decorative plastic
Or any other "passion" or hobby that you try to turn into a business. You end up spending the vast majority of your time on the business, and very little on the thing you once enjoyed.
Having done something similar in India I can say it definitely was fun. What makes it fun is there are next to no regulations so you can plop down in a place one day and just sell food.
Hah, try that in Germany. You shouldn’t even be giving food a sideways glance without your permits at hand. And don’t you dare to even consider selling beer alongside your snacks.
Is it similar to the US in that in theory you need a ton of permits, but in reality everyone kinda turns a blind eye to it unless you get too big/at a big venue?
For example, in the past year I've seen a guy selling tamales from his car trunk, someone selling candy apples from a cooler on the side of the road, one person making crab boils from their house, and a ton of people doing small batch type things on FB marketplace. Most of these would violate our local cottage laws, but I've seen police officers buying the tamales for example!
I have no doubt if someone got sick they could probably win a civil case of sorts, but I don't think I've seen or heard of any kind of attempt to shut down any of this via law.
It’s one of those things that’s fine until it isn’t. Eventually some Karen or restaurateur will rat you out to the sales tax authorities.
The cop thing doesn’t really matter. They stay in their lane until they don’t. I had an uncle who was NYPD, they’d randomly (from their pov) get tasked with cracking down on random crap. Sometimes they’d give folks a heads up.
In NYC the landlords are rapacious, so it’s difficult to compete with Pedro’s Taco Truck.
It’s because the best tamales come out of the back trunk of a car, or a cooler behind the counter of your local Mexican bakery. It’d be a tragedy to lose those flavors.
Absolutely, they were fantastic. I was a purchaser of said tamales pretty often. It was an older guy who said his wife made a bunch each morning, so he went out to sell them each day.
Usually in the US, unless it’s a massive city, vendors selling things out of their yards/trunk are ignored. It’s when you have a permanent/semi permanent stall that things get serious. Also selling things out of your trunk opens you up to significant liability risks if someone gets sick and can find you.
Depends heavily on the city too. I think this kind of thing is more accepted in NYC and LA with big immigrant communities from countries with more informal economies, but in Seattle it gets shut down quickly.
For better or worse, Germany has a certification fetish. It ensures a baseline of trustworthiness that you _want_ to have in the food industry, but it kills wonderful things like Berlin’s “Thai park” where kiosks propped up and started selling good food.
Regulation is preferable. The Thai park was shut down because it trashed the place and competed with regulated, tax-paying food markets.
The only issue is how slow and inefficient German bureaucracy is. It wouldn’t be a problem to request compliance if it didn’t take months and waste everyone’s time as they’re trying to get off the ground.
Hah, try that in New York! I looked in to getting a coffee cart to use in peak hours because I had a passion for how I wanted the cart to look and saw the crazy lines outside Starbucks in the AM.
- 20 year wait for a cart permit.
_ Shady black market license resales from veterans (who have priority access to licenses - which is great in theory)
- If you use water you need a ‘food’ license
- Illegal to store your cart anywhere but a licensed depo that charges exhorbitant
- very high penalties for unlicensed distribution
My girlfriend manages several Airbnbs around Hanoi, and many of these buildings have ground floors designed for small businesses—something that’s very common in Vietnam. In 2019, we decided to turn the ground floors of her rental locations into coffee shops and finished setting them up just in time for December that year!
Of course, as luck would have it, COVID-19 wasn’t exactly great for either Airbnb rentals or coffee shops. Since then, we’ve both shifted focus to other projects, but we’re definitely planning to give it another shot in the future when the timing feels right!
All the vietnamese coffee that I tried in europe (even in hype shops) tasted like american “french” roast aka burnt bad coffee. Could you recommend ways to try nice coffees from vietnam?
> All the vietnamese coffee ... “french” roast aka burnt bad coffee
You're describing traditional Vietnamese coffee for ca phe sua or ca phe den, it's close to burnt coffee because the sourced coffee beans are shit so they have to roast close to charcoal that's why we have to add a lot of sugar or condensed milk.
If you want to have coffees that taste close to specialty coffee then there are some local shops that colab or have their own farms that grow quality beans, but Idk if there's exporting roasted coffees.
I've seen a Vietnamese coffee brand from Amazon with fancy branding but my bet is still shitty coffee. Then the recommended way would be traveling to Vietnam, maybe?
Robusta coffees are much more popular across Asia, and there is a preference to mix coffee with milk.
In Europe and the US, there is a preference to drink Arabica coffee neat.
Starbucks had to pivot away from coffee to tea in India for that reason, and Starbucks in Vietnam failed due to their Arabica heavy bias [0] (also, Coffee shops in VN tend to also serve an equally robust Tea menu, which Starbucks fails at)
There are some solid coffee purist shops in D3, but the average consumer prefers Highland, Phuc Long, or Trung Nguyen Legend style shops and mixed coffees.
That said, the same problem mentioned in the blog above are slowly manifesting in VN as well. My in-laws are/were coffee farmers in Gia Lai, but they and their peers have pivoted to nuts like Macadamias instead because margins are better and Coffee is too commoditized
> I've seen a Vietnamese coffee brand from Amazon with fancy branding but my bet is still shitty coffee
Yep.
VN has a good FMCG market now, but they don't really target the US for exports.
It really has gotten to the point that different coffee should be treated as different teas. Nobody expect that the different teas should taste the same. For some reason, the expectation is largely that coffee should be coffee.
And, it is mind bending for some folks to hear that I abhor the taste of arabica coffee. It is so so bad.
Claiming you dislike Arabica is a weird statement. There is a bigger diversity inside of Arabica varietals alone than in tea and wine.
So that part bends my mind.
What about arabica do you detest, specifically? What of origin, processing, roasting, and brewing differences?
Arabica produces such a varied spectrum of cups, it’s really quite head scratching to hear you write off the entire species, yet still hear you drink robusta.
Fair if you are proposing that I probably would not hate all of it? Do you pursue robusta at the same level?
For specifics, its been a while since I tried it. I can seek out some to try again, if you want. I don't think it is as extreme as the "tastes like soap" reaction that many have on cilantro, but I'm growing to think it has to be similar.
I'm one of the lucky people where any coffee is coffee for me. McDonald's, Starbucks, instant coffee, specialty coffee, cat pooped coffee? Yup, it tastes like coffee, I'm good to go.
I put cream and sometimes sugar in my coffee, so I'm surely obscuring most of the subtleties.
But to me, Starbucks still tastes terrible (burned), and Dunkin Donuts is nasty.
In recent years I've ordered my roasted coffee from coffeebeanery.com, and I've been pretty happy. I'm pretty sure all of the varieties I get are Arabica.
Indeed, robusta. It amuses me that I'm probably fine with folgers and/or whatever cheap coffee you can get when in a hotel. At home, I think death wish is the only easy way I know to buy robusta whole bean.
I have had specialty robusta (I have some green robusta in my house right now) but it has always been pretty tough to drink for me, but I don't like adding sugar or milk to my coffee most of the time.
I take my coffee neat, most of the time. Have had more lattes than otherwise lately. And, oddly, that is the only way I can take the taste of arabica coffee. :D
“Go to Vietnam” is maybe not the most practical suggestion for grabbing a cup of coffee, but that’s where I found the best Vietnamese coffee.
As others have said, Vietnamese coffee was traditionally cheaper robusta beans, tended to be lower-quality, and was dark-roasted as a result. More recently, as Vietnam has gotten wealthier, there has been a craft coffee scene developing. I had great coffee in growing regions like Da Lat and Khe Sanh, and in specialty coffee shops in Hanoi like Dream Beans.
Sounds like you got a real Vietnamese coffee. All kidding aside, my experience drinking coffee here (Vietnam) is that most of the coffee shops have bad coffee. I am not sure if it's the beans, the machines or the culture. There is, maybe, 1 in 7 coffeeshop that will do the coffee kinda okay. I don't think the locals care too much (basing on google reviews).
Either way, I'll take this over any other SEA or Asian country where it's a hassle to find coffee outside metro hotspots. Cafes and Coffee here is available everywhere and usually within a 30 seconds walk.
This is a common cliche in the hipster coffee community. The truth is darker roasts change the acid profile of coffee, and many people prefer that taste. To them, drinking a "good" coffee is like drinking a "bad" coffee with a lemon squeezed into it.
A while ago I bought a coffee machine and the gadgets that go along with it. I managed to learn how to extract coffee evenly and all that stuff, but the final product was never tasty. It always tasted like hot puke. Then I realized I liked robusta, which is used for a proper Turkish (or Bosnian or Serbian) coffee that I grew up with.
not really a cliche. that is why starbucks does it. they can cover up taste of poor beans especially when adding milk. most prefer a dark roast because corporations want to make profits and made our tastebuds lazy by force drinking it everyday. just like food with sweeteners or msg. it just kills the purpose of food as a craft. nowadays its even more the opposite there is an hipster revival of dark roast or msg hyping culture as marketing tool to sell it. but lets be homest those things are cache-misère
"poor beans": This is the first time that I heard that Starbucks has poor beans. Can you explain more? To be clear: I am not here to shill for Starbucks.
Also: What do you say about Italians drinking a cappuccino or macchiato (expresso shot with a splash of steamed milk)? From what I have seen while traveling in Italy, most Italians drink coffee at small coffee shops. Or French people drinking cafe latte?
I rarely drank coffee (or tea, although I do drink tea again, somewhat, nowadays).
I used to drink Indian-style milk tea almost daily, earlier, in school, college, and later.
So once, some years ago, when I walked into a Cafe Coffee Day [1] shop (an Indian coffee shop chain, possibly modeled on Starbucks), and after looking at the menu, ordered a macchiato. it was a pleasant surprise to find that it tasted very good. :)
(I had nothing against coffee, it was a common drink at home, growing up, the filter coffee [2] kind, but also Nescafe and Bru, just that I did not prefer it much, later.)
Like what you like, I think that is great. Some people really like dark roasted coffee. Nothing wrong with that, they aren't wrong/unsophisticated/whatever.
However, roasting coffee dark does homogenize the flavor of the coffee, and you do lose more and more of what that coffee tastes like. Coffees have a ton of different flavor compounds, and no two coffees are the same. There are quality issues and processing issues though that don't help to highlight this too, so it's hard to find coffee - even from people who know how to roast - that can shine in this way.
I think everyone should try a good coffee that has some punchy flavors - I'm not saying everyone should like it. It's a fun thing and should be experienced if you're interested.
You can make this argument for all cooking. You could even substitute "light roast" for "dark roast" in the above and it would read exactly the same. Why not brew raw coffee berries?
You can indeed make a (less absolute) form of this argument for all cooking:
Overcooking and adding a lot of spices makes everything (more or less) edible. With less cooking and less spices, you can better taste the original ingredients.
When you say "cooking" here, do you *only* mean roasting coffee beans? Or do you use the term "cooking" more generally? If specific, I agree with your point. If general, I would say that cooking proteins fundamentally changes the food and makes it more digestible (meat, fish, eggs, etc.).
And cooking fundamentally changes the food because cooking is a chemical and physical reaction caused by the heat on the food being cooked. Proteins get denatured, food gets softer or harder (depending upon the amount of liquid and heat added or removed), etc.
I am not a expert on the science of cooking, these are just my casual, slightly scientific observations as a layman :)
I mean, you can agree that there's a difference between raw beef, a rare steak, medium, well done, and carbonized, right? Same deal. Some people may prefer well done and maybe even carbonized, but you have to agree that when you cook a steak that much you lose a lot of what the meat can offer.
You should try green coffee and see what you think. Some roast on the coffee does enhance the flavor, make it more soluble, etc.. "underdeveloped" is definitely a thing.
I'm sure you will agree that raw beef and a steak taste differently?
open a starbucks bean bag and smell it. I dont know one person who would say that smells good.
also french coffee is horrible mostly because it is controlled by only one group in a mafia like fashion where they rent you the coffee machine but you have to buy their beans. italians can make good coffee with old espresso machines and average beans which says more about their skills than anything else.
They are completely right. You put it in flowery words by saying it adjusts the acidity profile of the coffee. When it literally destroys a bunch of flavor compounds and replaces them with burnt notes.
I don’t follow - how do you mask a bad taste (bad coffee) with a bad taste (burned coffee)? I.e. if it’s going to taste bad then use a lighter roast, cheaper and faster anyway.
Burnt coffee taste like burnt coffee. Vietnamese drink coffee with 1/4 can of condensed milk in it.
Bad coffee beans if not roasted to charcoal state taste even worse. Argument that that most of available coffee in VN is made from pretty bad beans, so roasters have no other way to roast it to that level.
I agree. If they weren't making money, they'd go bust, so clearly someone likes the "burnt coffee". It's odd how some posters (not you!) Will act like an obvious opinion is to be taken as fact, and not acknowledge that some people like a certain taste. I mean, some people like super salty anchovies, but I abhor them, but I don't tell the anchovie lovers that they are incorrect.
I think it's because people that complain about "burnt coffee" (me) are people that take their coffee black and probably brew it at come.
Meanwhile, people that don't mind "burnt coffee" are the people that preferred coffee-based drinks from coffee shops. If I get a salted caramel mocha Frappuccino with two pumps of hazelnut - burnt beans are probably the only kind of beans I will be able to taste in that drink.
Dark roast isn't necessarily bad, quite a lot of people prefer the taste, especially if they're adding milk or other things to their drink.
But a dark roast is easier to produce, and easier to produce consistently. If you take high quality beans, and low quality beans, and roast them both to a dark level (let's say "French" or "Italian" roast), they're going to taste approximately the same. Therefore if you're producing coffee at a larger scale and want to save money, you can use cheaper beans and roast them dark to mask the imperfections that come with the cheaper beans.
There are some truly incredible coffees out there and a well-executed light or light-medium roast will bring out those flavors beautifully, but the quality starts at the coffee farm. You can't light roast a low quality coffee bean and expect those same excellent flavors.
The range is somehow (unburnt good coffee) > (burnt good coffee == burnt bad coffee) > (unburnt bad coffee).
If you are in the last box, you cannot get to the first one, but you can still move one step up by burning it. Plus you can add a lot of milk and cream and then it is almost the same anyway.
One could pretend that beans are intentionally burned, "The Vietnamese Way", regardless of the source material quality. Lighter roast would differ from batch to batch with varying not-so-good taste, but charcoal is always a charcoal.
Burnt meat tastes like burnt meat, people are familiar with it and can eat it, even it is not the greatest thing, and burnt meat tastes like burnt meat regardless of how it was in the beginning, so you could imagine that it was actually good, it just happened to be burnt. Not burnt meat has a wider range, it can taste good or bad, it's like in "dead men tell no tales" :)
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