Hey, you forgot to pin your comment...meanwhile, most of the comments are already jumping with joy to see food history here again without even scrolling down enough to see yours! :)
This was so great, just came back from Vietnam and the coffee culture there is huge! Never thought Germany had a contribution, so much interesting facts! The more you know...
East Germany actually had several Vietnam-themed postal stamps as part of an aid program between 1965 and 1979. The program was called "Unbesiegbares Vietnam", invincible Vietnam and the stamps showed the Vietnamese as brave revolutionaries. Buying those stamps meant a donation to the country, with the amount printed onto the stamp. There was a very deep connection to their Socialist brothers and coffee source. However, a great number of Vietnamese refugees from the South would be rescued from drifting in the Pacific and taken in by West Germany. So which part of one divided country you were from determined which part of another divided country would help you.
One wouldn't expect two countries with no obvious link to have any, and most Germans wouldn't know either, but here we are. There's that, and a common love for Maggi and kohlrabi.
LandBack for the indigenous Montagnard peoples of Vietnam and STOP Vietnamese settler colonialism and global capitalism, STOP the coffee industry in Vietnam and Brazil NOW
Not just Germany, but specifically EASTERN Germany. My parents actually told me that despite not earning much in Eastern Germany, since rent and food was cheap, and there was often nothing attractive available to spend their remaining money on. The flipside of capitalism. So they actually indulged in coffee, although it was roughly 10 times more expensive in ratio to the income than today. Also for a time you could study coffee production at university in Eastern Germany on a high level.
Yeah, that was the thing. The easy access to exotic things like coffee and chocolate was so easy in the West because they were able to steal it from everyone else. Life wasn't perfect in the East, but at least there weren't slave society to keep a small upper class happy😅
@@gunterxvoices4101 What? You were literally shot at if you tried to leave and could be sent to forced labor camps. That's actual slavery. While the political elites enjoyed a life of luxury, the average worker had to make due with poor living standards. Socialism is much worse than Capitalism.
I thought it's very funny that East Germany 50-50 mix was kinda similar to what the Vietnamese commoners were drinking back in the 90s. The Vietnamese 50-50 is 50% coffee and 50% roasted corn (and sorghum) - I was told that rice was actually cheaper as a filler but its being a staple in Vietnam means people can easily tell the flavour apart so corn then. 😅
Some said cheap places still sell that mix in vietnam these days 😂 Have to admit that it is really hard to tell it and the common robusta a part. People just too accustomed to the “strong” mix that anything less bitter like arabica mix be deemed lesser quality lol I personally cant stand the arabica coffee though even knowing all of these. Espresso shots taste like instant powdered coffee, cappuccino and latte seems to be the coffee flavored milk and iced americano is just like bland bitter water 😂
LandBack for the indigenous Montagnard peoples of Vietnam, LandBack for the indigenous Cham people of Central Vietnam, LandBack for the indigenous Hmong people in Northern Vietnam
@@duongtieuta223 I'm a barrista at a coffee shop, and I can confirm a latte is coffee flavored milk, no matter how you look at it. A common latte is 2 shots of espresso(about 40 mL each, so around 75-90 mL of coffee) to about 14 oz(~420mL) of steamed milk, 20% of which is literally foam.
Religious drinker of Vietnamese coffee here. Excellent historical video as always, but allow me to add on some context: The majority of Vietnam's "coffee industry" in the French Colonial Era was not produced by local farmers, but rather in massive French-owned plantations that rely heavily on low-skilled, indentured colonial labor. The living & working condition in those places were so horrible, that alongside peppers & rubber, coffee would be known as "the tree fertilized by Vietnamese blood". And the reason why coffee production plummeted, I mean, beside the obvious decades long war? As it turn out, most of the land suitable for coffee was too far from population centers and their related infrastructure (e.g: hospitals, schools...) and factor in the massive development & maintenance costs would make coffee unprofitable. So, then why did the French not think of it, and why did their coffee export brought them so much money? The reason is simple: The colonial workers were not expected to settle down in those areas. They're sent there to grow money tree for their masters, and would either wisen up and (attempt to) leave, or die. So the reason for Vietnamese coffee's period of decline is less "communist can't grow coffee" but more "without massive exploitation and human cruelty, colonialism-style coffee industry is impossible"
I wish I could boost your reply even more than just one like! other people need to see this one similarly I'd wager that East Germany's limited ability to secure coffee supply is... drumroll... also due to imperialism, as coffee is a tropical crop that doesn't grow well in north america or europe... well, it just so happens that the targets of western imperialism (and the horrible labor conditions and exploitation) are tropical countries. the prevalence of a lack of fair trade coffee is still a modern day issue, because imperialism as a system has adapted but is still in place. thanks, capitalism.
But it's a white-washed version of history lmao. He specifically skirted over the French part of coffee introduction into Vietnam. He said that coffee were grown by small time farmers for themselves and to make extra cash, but the reality is that all the coffee plantation at the time were owned by French colonists and produced for the European market. Vietnamese traditionally drank tea, which was why coffee never caught on until the early 2000s' urbanization among college kids and office workers. The French colonists were the plantation owners who were forced to hand over the land and kicked out in 1954, not 1945. During the Vietnam-American war, the coffee plantations never took off again because the region that grew coffee in Vietnam, the central highland, was part of the Ho Chi Minh trail and was being constantly bombed by the US during the war. After 1975, there were attempts to resurrect the coffee farming, just in the hands of coop instead of French colonists, but the production could not be shipped to the market in Europe and NA because Vietnam was under US sanction until 1995. In short, he purposely moved the timeline around and skirted over the French's role specifically to downplay the colonial ownership of the coffee plantations back before 1954 and to blame the current government for "taking the plantations away from those poor plantation owners", who were, in fact, French and quite well-known for their abuse of Vietnamese workers at the time.
@@Booklover138 that’s all true, but the very basic storyline given in the video is quite intricate to start with. Besides this Ho Chi Min was not quite the angel he is portaient by the left either, the editorial choice to overlook that whole period is better if you just want to tell the coffee story while avoiding the old post-colonial/communist fight.
@@reggievonramstein Ho Chi Minh was our country's revolutionary leader, so dont insult him. Dont care which political spectrum you're in. He had nothing to do with coffee's initial lukewarm reception among the Vietnamese population, which, contrary to this video, had more to do with the French being the owners of the coffee plantations and Vietnam being a historically tea country. The history in this video is like completely wrong, doesnt get even a single thing right. Not even the fact that Vietnam was historically a tea country. It would only seem "intricate" to people who know nothing about Vietnamese culture and history, nor any knowledge of the French colonial history.
Calling the decline of coffee production in Vietnam a "mismanagement" is kinda very wrong. Think yourself in to the situation in Vietnam at the time. The whole country was basically bombed to oblivion by the US, no matter what kind of agriculture you wanted to do, it involved intense work in removing mines, duds and polluted earth from the Agent Orange flights. So what will your prioritized crop be, when you are a huge poulation who needs to eat every day? Definitly not coffee! And thanks to the fact that any country able to help with these shortcomings didn't want to cooperate with Vietnam for ideological reasons there was no other way than focusing exclusively on staple food at first.
They needed coffee as an export good because that‘s the only way to get their hands on hard currency they needed to import many goods crucial for the country that weren‘t available in socialist states - so it‘s a bit too easy to say coffee wasn’t essential
@@mynameisandong I think, we are talking debating past each other here. I was just trying to state that it's kinda misinterpreted to call it mismanagement if a country prefers staple foods over coffee. Vietnam is an agrarian country, of course they would focus on the feeding the people first. Yes, that coffee is wonderful to get some sweet foreign currency to for example acquire industrial machines can't be denied. Making sure that nobody starves is just a little more important.
@@mynameisandong this is just not true. Viet Nam at the time didn’t trade much with the outside so hard currency wasn’t a pressing issue. There was no need to export just to get currency.
"Mismanagement" refers to the Soviet-style planned economy that plunged a primary rice-growing country to the edge of famine. It's very much the communist party's wrong-headed, ideologically driven economic policies that brought our country to that point. Why do you feel the need to brush that off?
I swear that Vietnamese coffee culture and Greek coffee culture mixed in South Australia to make Farmers Union Iced Coffee, which tastes essentially like a Vietnamese coffee with milk. we love it so much here, that in 2008-9 it outsold Coca-Cola by 3:1 (they now own a milk drink company which is not as popular). For many, it is too sweet, but its the drink of choice for us, and one day I will find a way to get James Hoffman to try it just to see his expression.
As a local Vietnamese, I did NOT know about this. Now I know who to thanks for my daily anxiety juice. Thanks Andong. Oh beside, you really should try Vietnamese egg coffee sometimes, it's beyond delicious!
Is the egg raw? I’m kind of intrigued but eating raw eggs always comes with a slight health risk so I’m not sure it’s something that’s good to have as your daily coffee
@@vincentperratore4395 the Bauhaus school was established in the Weimar years in former East Germany, it was a hugely influential movement in western Europe, but after WWII, the abstract, heavily stylized forms were rejected by the USSR under the stalinist regime, because they were associated with the west and capitalism. Socialist Realism became the most widely accepted visual style for communist nations. (this is still the case in North Korea today) This shift in preferred graphic style in USSR was pretty interesting because pre-stalinist Russia actually developed their own brand of abstract, stylized visual style called "Constructivism". Constructivism had a strong following in the post-revolution Russia during the early 1900's because it was seen as a break from the visual norm of the Tsarist regime, therefore was closely associated the communist revolution in Russia, so much so that Lenin's tomb was built in this style.
There are still a lot of people with a Vietnamese migration background going back to that time in Germany. Many have moved to the West since reunification but they also heavily cluster around Berlin.
In the mid 1990s I helped in a project for the German aid agency GIZ, which helped take the old East German project and increase production and efficiency significantly. That was the take off point where Vietnam became the second largest global coffee exporter
Now that's a piece of history I've never heard of before, fascinating stuff. Now I just want Vietnamese food, my absolute favorite. Thanks for sharing.
Care packages with coffee packs, the metal foil packaging, where also a good way to hide the security metal strip of paper money. Chances the packages went through cargo scanning and didn't "get lost" were greatly increased when money was fixed to coffee packages, canned pineapple and similar.
Now THAT'S my boy Andong, the one I always loved. Lots of background research, great infos, neatly presented and truly enjoyable docu-style contents. Thanks for this interesting chapter of food history!
The video is greatly biased towards Capitalism being better than Socialism, and didnt address the horrible human costs of the French plantations in Indochina for some reasons, otherwise, its a good video.
@@unserkatzenland8884 Franco-Vietnamese settler colonialism and the destruction of indigenous Montagnard peoples who earliest inhabitants of Southeast Asia
The subtitles "Hey, I know what you're thinking" for "Jetzt will ich aber nicht gehört haben, was Sie vielleicht gedacht haben" unfortunately does not capture the intricacies of that sentence. A more literal translation would have been "I chose to overhear what you might have thought" implying "because otherwise I would have to report you to the authorities and you'd be in big trouble". I know these subtitles were not created by Andong, so this is no criticism, I just thought it might be interesting to non-German speakers.
That's an incorrect translation, overheard means something different. The translation should be '' I chose not to hear what you might have thought. Overheard ist schwer zu uebersetzen, bedeutet so was wie zufaellig gehoert, aus einem Gespraech woran man nicht beteiligt war.
@@simonh6371 Yes it was Melitta Bentz & she was born in Dresden where she also invented it & started her business... Wikipedia: "The fast-growing company eventually relocated in 1929 to Minden in eastern Westphalia as no more satisfactory production facilities could be found in Dresden."
@@n_other_1604 Thanks I did look on wiki afterwards and found out she invented it in Dresden. I know Minden pretty well actually, I was stationed in Herford for 2 years. Used to go to some club there with German friends.
It is weird to say "things started to look real good" during French colonial rule, maybe for the French rulers and coffee plantation owners, i guess. Saying the Vietnam War was devastating for coffee industry to some extent is true, but we had a lot of important stuff to worry about, fancy bean juice is not one of them. Honestly, if there were bombs exploding around you it wouldn't stop you from having your daily morning coffee enema. Tone deaf is the most i can say about this video.
There’s only so much information you can include in a 15 minute video. my priority is to share this under-told story. you can’t reasonably expect me to turn this into a discourse about colonialism and Socialism and still keep it watchable. I just like most recipe videos that includes meat will not discuss its consequences of climate change, and the unsustainability of the meat industry
@@mynameisandong Weak excuse, no one asking you to do that, i don't know what your bias are (anti-communist?) but the tone is completely wrong on that part, solely focus on coffee and ignore the suffering part of the people. There are youtube recipe videos that discuss sustainability of the ingredients. Completely ignore the Vietnamese farmer's suffer (at that point they didn't even know what communism were) but went great length to describe the Germans need their coffee like their life depends on it. It's not that hard to write a couple empathic lines of script. I think you should take this criticism and write a better script next time, or just forget about writing a history piece because this one is terrible.
@@mynameisandong no time to mention the colonial plantations were not in fact “looking real good” for its workers. But enough time to claim that the socialist Vietnamese state deprioritizing coffee growing in order to literally feed their population and drag them out of poverty was “mismanagement “ It seems like it’s actually just your bias showing. It’s your script and you get to choose to speak as much or as little about any matter as you see fit. The fact that you did not is telling
I have to admit I never heard of vietnamese coffee before. But I will definitely try it! And most importantly: Thanks for yet another amazing food history video. I laughed, I learned and I will definitely test my east german colleagues on their history knowledge tomorrow!
A tip: Don't be fooled and do not drink too much at once because it tasted like a tasty dessert, the authentic drink is quite strong. I made that mistake way too many times...
I got hooked on Viet coffee a few years ago. My favorite is still a blend of 50/50% Robusta /Arabica, as I think they complement each other. Robusta has a rougher, more chocolaty flavor, wheres Arabica has an appealing floral taste, but can tend towed an unpleasant acidity. The blend tends to tame the excess of either alone. IMHO
During the planned economy period in Vietnam, which lasted until 1985-1986, the Government of Vietnam also limited people's access to coffee, and they did come up with the same thing that GDR did- mixing all kind of stuffs, from soy beans, corn,... to areca nut extraction to recreate the taste and smell of strong coffee. That very method was brought to a higher level by Trung Nguyên, the most well known Vietnamese coffee brand, which turns it into a million dollar business, and they still continue that "blending" until today. That's why people with coffee knowledge, or those who have access/tasted real coffee, are turning their back on Trung Nguyên, and show their support to smaller coffee producers/brands that offer the real deal.
Most of the audience of this video they don't bother understand the fact. East Germany coffee style almost destroyed our coffee heritage from the French. Tụi khán giả kênh này có hiểu gì về lịch sử phát triển của cafe Việt Nam mình đâu. Đa phần thông tin xàm
@@cuthomas4664 hello, Sir! im small YT blogger and now i'm making a video about Vietnam coffe, where are you leave can i ask you a few question about hostory of coffee?
I recently had some Vietnamese Specialty Coffee and it was quite enjoyable. I do enjoy Ethiopian and Columbian Coffee more but it had some nice deep flavours though not as complex as higher grown coffees
Vietnam is the definition of bounce back , having to defend themselves against invaders not for decades but centuries. Not just Just mainland Vietnamese but all Vietnamese are just downright resilient people.
Heya Andong! (east) German viewer here! I was expecting something else from this video. As most of the "Chinese" restaurants where I live are managed by people with Vietnamese origin, I wondered if you could shine a light on why so many Vietnamese came to the GDR. Nevertheless, very interesting stuff!^^ Me likey!^^ Thank you!
It is possible that the Chinese restaurants run by Vietnamese might have some traces of Chinese bloodline or are Chinese who lived in Vietnam before immigrating. In Vietnam, these people are referred to as the Hoa people and are an ethnic group in Vietnam.
@@aznmochibunny Nope. It has to do with the Vietnamese guest workers in East Germany. After the wall of the Berlin Wall most of them were laid off when the factories they worked in closed down and (IIRC) Vietnam wouldn't take them back before their contracted term ended. The same time saw a large spike in demand for chinese-style cuisine.
they came to study and to work. The only type of immigration that Germany needs and also a beneficial arrangement for the migrants themselves. I would change the 100.000s of Afghans, Syrians etc for Vietnamese people, if it would be possible.
Also in the West and also with Thai cuisine. Most generic Asia Imbisse are still managed by people named Nguyen and Tran. The first Asian restaurant in the town near my village was Korean with the typical westernised Chinese dishes and Korean ones. A local Hotel owner's son married a Korean back then.
There is also a weird kind of coffee in Vietnam, mostly used by the Communist forces in South Vietnam during the war. They used rice, break them into powder, put on heated pan until gaining black or brown color, add some water and sugar then boil this mixture and serve. They won the war with some kind of weird drink like that.
In Malaysia and Singapore, we have a coffee mixture made by roasting together cheaper Robusta coffee beans, wheat flour, sugar and magarine. Known locally as kopi kampung (koepee karmpoong), it is popular especially among older people. Its creamy and caramalised taste coupled with higher levels of caffeine plus cheaper price are unrivalled. Served straight or with sugar or with sweetened condensed milk, it goes well with half boiled eggs (flavoured with soy sauce and white pepper powder) and toast with kaya (kar yar/egg coconut cream) jam for breakfast or tea.
Vietnamese are recent settler colonists in the highland area brought by French colonials to genocide and replace the indigenous Montagnard peoples and take over their lands
Kevin McLeod and all the other musicians... Nowadays no one even seems to want to credit them anymore for their Creative Commons work that keeps youtube alive.
Back in 2018 I visited Hanoi and Saigon and in both cities I was able to get phin coffee while eating breakfast. In 2022 I visited Saigon again and phin coffee was nowhere to be found. Every coffee shop was using espresso machines like in the US. Life is getting faster there so small things like that have gone away.
Great Video Andong (: Still astounded by the complex colonial circumstances that brought Beverages like Tea, Coffee & Spirits around the World. Thanks for doing really needed educational work! Keep it coming!
I had the pleasure of tasting amazing arabica coffee in Dal Lat. So delicious... The classic vietnamese coffee is mostly 100% robusta and despite being super strong it's pretty boring taste wise. Didn't get used to the sweetened condensed milk though...
Fascinating. I'd always assumed that Vietnam's coffee had something to do with French colonialism (like their pastries and sandwiches). This was a very educational -- and entertaining -- video. Thanks Andong!
I know how much work these videos are, but you have a talent to tell this very interesting stories in a funny manner and this brings so muuuuch value to RUclips. Please keep up with this! Kellogg’s was so far my favourite and still use this in smalltalk conversations 😅
Thanks for this food history Andong. It was really fascinating and I enjoyed it a great deal! 🙂 Please keep making these sort of episodes along with all of your other very enjoyable and informative videos. I always learn something when I watch your videos.
This was very enjoyable and brought back very old (65 years ago( memories when we escaped Hungary in 1956 with one imitation leather suitcase and in the suitcase was a packet of coffee because no coffee = no life..
Great vid, thanks for sourcing and squeezing in so much old footage, loved it! Actually I knew about the East German connection from a German documentary miniseries ''Mahlzeit DDR'' which has a whole episode about the coffee problem, but I didn't know it had been started under French colonial rule Liked and subscribed
Vietnamese coffee with condensed milk is to die for. I'm really considering of buying that special cup for preparation of Vietnamese coffee the next time I'm in Berlin.
I just love how this video made me feel good about coffee. I love coffee in any case and vietnam style is in the top 5 of all coffee styles. I am smarter than yesterday, so thanks again Andong!
what happened to the GDR contracts the Vietnamese had signed? Did the reunified FRG agree to cancel them, how did Vietnam escape paying for its contractual obligations?
Andong Wonderful. As a Teutonophile, foodie, and history nut this little gem escaped my notice before. It's one of those tiny details that gets lost in the shuffle. It was also fun seeing the old East German coffee packets. I've noticed that ex-colonies in the warmer parts of the world all use canned milk. Many famous drinks (the first I learned of was Thai Tea) use canned milk as an ingredient Tbank you for this. 🤓 all the best, Jim Oaxaca Mexico
Speaking as a Vietnamese, I do think our use of condense milk is more of a result f wartime ration. In fact, here we do raise our own dairy cattle and have even started to experiment with cheese making
I love how you spin willingness to use exploitative labor in colonised 3rd world countries as a capitalist positive, while condemning the self sufficient policies of more socialist regimes. "plantations started popping up and things looked great" is a lovely take. also love how the crash in vietnamese production is of course the "communist"s fault and not the century of imperial oppression and war. tremendous.
I also wondered what he was smoking before making this video. It started off well but he lost me with his romanticised view of the French "presence"....lol they dont even call it "colonialism" anymore. I'm sure not many Vietnamese cried or were sad when the French left. I wonder if the person making the video has Vietnamese ancestry (at least its hardly noticeable when you look at him), if he does, he should know better.
Why not? Vietnamese coffee has some of the best robusta mixes out there. (And no, i won't suffer the Western coffee snobs looking down on robusta gladly)
Love these kind of history videos you do. I'd suggest swapping out the thumbnail with something a little more striking so that it catches the eye of more people as it deserves to.
It's such an irony that the GDR actually invested MASSIVELY in fixing their coffee production. (Also impressive progress in roasting technology) Shortly before the collapse the coffee was actually ok I heard. But NOBODY bought it because it had such a terrible reputation.
@@am05mhz The west German care packets and the prestige of that coffee played an undeniably huge role indeed. For the GDR coffee was a huge deal because it made them look terrible. I don't want to overrate this aspect. But it was certainly a not negligible contribution to the downfall.
I watched a documentary on this, one of 3 in the MDR series Mahlzeit DDR. If I remember rightly the 50/50 Mischung was so terrible and people said it was a waste of what little coffee they had to mix it and make it undrinkable, so they just went back to selling it pure at a higher price, and drinking less coffee. I would do the same.
Some points to say here: coffee was introduced to Vietnam by the French with zones designated for planting. They were largely the same method of production until 1986. Coffee industry in Vietnam distributed heavily in Central Highland (South Vietnam), so it was heavily impacted by the war and its consequence (labour shortage, bureaucracy led to low yeld, no market for coffee product...) After 1990, the coffee industry have been taking off again, largely thanks to the privatization of farm land back to the farmers and open market. East Germany had went a great length to help Vietnamese communist goverment, but East Germany had very limited impact on Vietnamese coffee industry. We owned it thanks to the French, people like Alexader Yersin!
Who‘s pumped for some food history? It‘s been a while 🥳🤩
Hey, you forgot to pin your comment...meanwhile, most of the comments are already jumping with joy to see food history here again without even scrolling down enough to see yours! :)
Me!!! I am! Wonderful video, I always love your food history forays!
Your channel is a GEM
Не пропадай, we need you.
Meeeeeee
This was so great, just came back from Vietnam and the coffee culture there is huge! Never thought Germany had a contribution, so much interesting facts! The more you know...
East Germany actually had several Vietnam-themed postal stamps as part of an aid program between 1965 and 1979.
The program was called "Unbesiegbares Vietnam", invincible Vietnam and the stamps showed the Vietnamese as brave revolutionaries.
Buying those stamps meant a donation to the country, with the amount printed onto the stamp.
There was a very deep connection to their Socialist brothers and coffee source.
However, a great number of Vietnamese refugees from the South would be rescued from drifting in the Pacific and taken in by West Germany.
So which part of one divided country you were from determined which part of another divided country would help you.
so great,
youtubeeem.com/6ZbD8H1G2gi
admit I never heard of vietnamese coffee before. But I will
One wouldn't expect two countries with no obvious link to have any, and most Germans wouldn't know either, but here we are. There's that, and a common love for Maggi and kohlrabi.
The coffee filter was invented in east Germany... Saxony has a forgotten coffee culture as long & rich as Vienna, Italy, France & so on.
LandBack for the indigenous Montagnard peoples of Vietnam and STOP Vietnamese settler colonialism and global capitalism, STOP the coffee industry in Vietnam and Brazil NOW
Not just Germany, but specifically EASTERN Germany. My parents actually told me that despite not earning much in Eastern Germany, since rent and food was cheap, and there was often nothing attractive available to spend their remaining money on. The flipside of capitalism. So they actually indulged in coffee, although it was roughly 10 times more expensive in ratio to the income than today.
Also for a time you could study coffee production at university in Eastern Germany on a high level.
Yeah, that was the thing. The easy access to exotic things like coffee and chocolate was so easy in the West because they were able to steal it from everyone else. Life wasn't perfect in the East, but at least there weren't slave society to keep a small upper class happy😅
The DDR was exactly that, a slave state with an elite class!
@@gunterxvoices4101 Well...they were still that...work and hierachy didn't go away lmao
@@wheresmyeyebrow1608 I mean, the Junkers weren't in control of the government anymore. Fuck the Noble class and fuck the Nazis.
@@gunterxvoices4101 What? You were literally shot at if you tried to leave and could be sent to forced labor camps. That's actual slavery. While the political elites enjoyed a life of luxury, the average worker had to make due with poor living standards. Socialism is much worse than Capitalism.
I thought it's very funny that East Germany 50-50 mix was kinda similar to what the Vietnamese commoners were drinking back in the 90s. The Vietnamese 50-50 is 50% coffee and 50% roasted corn (and sorghum) - I was told that rice was actually cheaper as a filler but its being a staple in Vietnam means people can easily tell the flavour apart so corn then. 😅
I can't, really 🤣
The only noticeable difference is the corn blend is significantly less sour (which I don't hate but don't like either)
Some said cheap places still sell that mix in vietnam these days 😂 Have to admit that it is really hard to tell it and the common robusta a part.
People just too accustomed to the “strong” mix that anything less bitter like arabica mix be deemed lesser quality lol
I personally cant stand the arabica coffee though even knowing all of these. Espresso shots taste like instant powdered coffee, cappuccino and latte seems to be the coffee flavored milk and iced americano is just like bland bitter water 😂
@@duongtieuta223 You sound the same as those fillipino's that defend their cuisine...
LandBack for the indigenous Montagnard peoples of Vietnam, LandBack for the indigenous Cham people of Central Vietnam, LandBack for the indigenous Hmong people in Northern Vietnam
@@duongtieuta223 I'm a barrista at a coffee shop, and I can confirm a latte is coffee flavored milk, no matter how you look at it. A common latte is 2 shots of espresso(about 40 mL each, so around 75-90 mL of coffee) to about 14 oz(~420mL) of steamed milk, 20% of which is literally foam.
Religious drinker of Vietnamese coffee here. Excellent historical video as always, but allow me to add on some context: The majority of Vietnam's "coffee industry" in the French Colonial Era was not produced by local farmers, but rather in massive French-owned plantations that rely heavily on low-skilled, indentured colonial labor. The living & working condition in those places were so horrible, that alongside peppers & rubber, coffee would be known as "the tree fertilized by Vietnamese blood".
And the reason why coffee production plummeted, I mean, beside the obvious decades long war? As it turn out, most of the land suitable for coffee was too far from population centers and their related infrastructure (e.g: hospitals, schools...) and factor in the massive development & maintenance costs would make coffee unprofitable. So, then why did the French not think of it, and why did their coffee export brought them so much money? The reason is simple: The colonial workers were not expected to settle down in those areas. They're sent there to grow money tree for their masters, and would either wisen up and (attempt to) leave, or die.
So the reason for Vietnamese coffee's period of decline is less "communist can't grow coffee" but more "without massive exploitation and human cruelty, colonialism-style coffee industry is impossible"
Great point, thanks!
I wish I could boost your reply even more than just one like! other people need to see this one
similarly I'd wager that East Germany's limited ability to secure coffee supply is... drumroll... also due to imperialism, as coffee is a tropical crop that doesn't grow well in north america or europe... well, it just so happens that the targets of western imperialism (and the horrible labor conditions and exploitation) are tropical countries. the prevalence of a lack of fair trade coffee is still a modern day issue, because imperialism as a system has adapted but is still in place. thanks, capitalism.
So what you are saying is the communists weren't capable of building basic infrastructure near the money making region. Gotcha.
I was scrolling to see whether anyone else had made this point before I chimed in and I'm glad to see someone did.
Slavery is an unworkable economic system. Communism is full slave economy.
Never thought a guy from Germany would be teaching me about my own ancestors LMAO
Wait it gets better, a Russian guy from Germany, teaching a Vietnamese about his country. And I’m a French guy commenting…😅
@@reggievonramstein we love diversity indeed
But it's a white-washed version of history lmao. He specifically skirted over the French part of coffee introduction into Vietnam. He said that coffee were grown by small time farmers for themselves and to make extra cash, but the reality is that all the coffee plantation at the time were owned by French colonists and produced for the European market. Vietnamese traditionally drank tea, which was why coffee never caught on until the early 2000s' urbanization among college kids and office workers. The French colonists were the plantation owners who were forced to hand over the land and kicked out in 1954, not 1945. During the Vietnam-American war, the coffee plantations never took off again because the region that grew coffee in Vietnam, the central highland, was part of the Ho Chi Minh trail and was being constantly bombed by the US during the war. After 1975, there were attempts to resurrect the coffee farming, just in the hands of coop instead of French colonists, but the production could not be shipped to the market in Europe and NA because Vietnam was under US sanction until 1995. In short, he purposely moved the timeline around and skirted over the French's role specifically to downplay the colonial ownership of the coffee plantations back before 1954 and to blame the current government for "taking the plantations away from those poor plantation owners", who were, in fact, French and quite well-known for their abuse of Vietnamese workers at the time.
@@Booklover138 that’s all true, but the very basic storyline given in the video is quite intricate to start with. Besides this Ho Chi Min was not quite the angel he is portaient by the left either, the editorial choice to overlook that whole period is better if you just want to tell the coffee story while avoiding the old post-colonial/communist fight.
@@reggievonramstein Ho Chi Minh was our country's revolutionary leader, so dont insult him. Dont care which political spectrum you're in. He had nothing to do with coffee's initial lukewarm reception among the Vietnamese population, which, contrary to this video, had more to do with the French being the owners of the coffee plantations and Vietnam being a historically tea country. The history in this video is like completely wrong, doesnt get even a single thing right. Not even the fact that Vietnam was historically a tea country. It would only seem "intricate" to people who know nothing about Vietnamese culture and history, nor any knowledge of the French colonial history.
Calling the decline of coffee production in Vietnam a "mismanagement" is kinda very wrong. Think yourself in to the situation in Vietnam at the time. The whole country was basically bombed to oblivion by the US, no matter what kind of agriculture you wanted to do, it involved intense work in removing mines, duds and polluted earth from the Agent Orange flights.
So what will your prioritized crop be, when you are a huge poulation who needs to eat every day? Definitly not coffee! And thanks to the fact that any country able to help with these shortcomings didn't want to cooperate with Vietnam for ideological reasons there was no other way than focusing exclusively on staple food at first.
They needed coffee as an export good because that‘s the only way to get their hands on hard currency they needed to import many goods crucial for the country that weren‘t available in socialist states - so it‘s a bit too easy to say coffee wasn’t essential
@@mynameisandong I think, we are talking debating past each other here. I was just trying to state that it's kinda misinterpreted to call it mismanagement if a country prefers staple foods over coffee. Vietnam is an agrarian country, of course they would focus on the feeding the people first.
Yes, that coffee is wonderful to get some sweet foreign currency to for example acquire industrial machines can't be denied.
Making sure that nobody starves is just a little more important.
@@mynameisandong this is just not true. Viet Nam at the time didn’t trade much with the outside so hard currency wasn’t a pressing issue. There was no need to export just to get currency.
"Mismanagement" refers to the Soviet-style planned economy that plunged a primary rice-growing country to the edge of famine. It's very much the communist party's wrong-headed, ideologically driven economic policies that brought our country to that point. Why do you feel the need to brush that off?
the real problem was their war in cambodia there were sanctions placed on them and allot of them was stationed in cambodia fighting the khmer rouge.
I swear that Vietnamese coffee culture and Greek coffee culture mixed in South Australia to make Farmers Union Iced Coffee, which tastes essentially like a Vietnamese coffee with milk. we love it so much here, that in 2008-9 it outsold Coca-Cola by 3:1 (they now own a milk drink company which is not as popular). For many, it is too sweet, but its the drink of choice for us, and one day I will find a way to get James Hoffman to try it just to see his expression.
Do that!
Vietnam do have milk coffee tho. And it is popular, too. I wonder if these 2 type of coffee have any relation...
yeahhh now i can see it... Also try Boss Vanilla coffee similar to VN coffee
As a local Vietnamese, I did NOT know about this. Now I know who to thanks for my daily anxiety juice. Thanks Andong.
Oh beside, you really should try Vietnamese egg coffee sometimes, it's beyond delicious!
there are absolutely NO document or news about this in Vietnam =.=
Đông Đức tài trợ cho Việt Nam , Đông Đức sụp đổ , không phải chia 50% sản lượng cho Đông Đức . adu vip
@@tovarishsus ngon :))))))))))))))
@@DoCatTuong753 Because East Germany doesn't exist
Is the egg raw? I’m kind of intrigued but eating raw eggs always comes with a slight health risk so I’m not sure it’s something that’s good to have as your daily coffee
It brings me joy to know that Bauhaus graphic design was still going strong in the GDR, those old packagings are beautiful!
Why?
@@vincentperratore4395 because Mies Van der Rohe
@@vincentperratore4395 the Bauhaus school was established in the Weimar years in former East Germany, it was a hugely influential movement in western Europe, but after WWII, the abstract, heavily stylized forms were rejected by the USSR under the stalinist regime, because they were associated with the west and capitalism. Socialist Realism became the most widely accepted visual style for communist nations. (this is still the case in North Korea today) This shift in preferred graphic style in USSR was pretty interesting because pre-stalinist Russia actually developed their own brand of abstract, stylized visual style called "Constructivism". Constructivism had a strong following in the post-revolution Russia during the early 1900's because it was seen as a break from the visual norm of the Tsarist regime, therefore was closely associated the communist revolution in Russia, so much so that Lenin's tomb was built in this style.
Not only that, Vietnam was also the biggest source for guest workers in the GDR. And condensed milk in coffee is also popular.
There are still a lot of people with a Vietnamese migration background going back to that time in Germany. Many have moved to the West since reunification but they also heavily cluster around Berlin.
In the mid 1990s I helped in a project for the German aid agency GIZ, which helped take the old East German project and increase production and efficiency significantly. That was the take off point where Vietnam became the second largest global coffee exporter
Now that's a piece of history I've never heard of before, fascinating stuff. Now I just want Vietnamese food, my absolute favorite. Thanks for sharing.
Care packages with coffee packs, the metal foil packaging, where also a good way to hide the security metal strip of paper money. Chances the packages went through cargo scanning and didn't "get lost" were greatly increased when money was fixed to coffee packages, canned pineapple and similar.
These documentaries are some of your best videos, glad to see another one!
As a Vietnamese, this is incredibly fascinating to know 😄
Now THAT'S my boy Andong, the one I always loved. Lots of background research, great infos, neatly presented and truly enjoyable docu-style contents.
Thanks for this interesting chapter of food history!
vietnamese
youtubeeem.com/QXBAMPQOgMZ
deep dives connecting history and culture back in your food vi
郭富城算童顏，劉德華再畫個老妝還算無違和。
youtubeeem.com/FVI7OJmmaHB
人家制毒都卖国外赚外汇，😂😂😂这缉毒太悬浮了😂😂😂
The video is greatly biased towards Capitalism being better than Socialism, and didnt address the horrible human costs of the French plantations in Indochina for some reasons, otherwise, its a good video.
@@unserkatzenland8884 Franco-Vietnamese settler colonialism and the destruction of indigenous Montagnard peoples who earliest inhabitants of Southeast Asia
@@unserkatzenland8884 indigenous resistance against French colonialism: Jarai revolt 1887-1897, Mnong revolt 1894-1902 Rhade mutiny 1920 N'trang Lon revolt 1912-1935
Indigenous resistance against Vietnamese-US colonialism: Y Bham Noei's civil right movement 1958-1962 Montagnard uprisings 1964-1965 FULRO insurgency against Kinh settler chauvinists 1967-1992
Thank you for the history of Vietnamese coffee. I couldn't believe it that Gẻmany actually helped Vietnam in the coffee industry. Good research.
I'm Vietnamese, I drink coffee everyday but never think about the coffee history, It is good to know where coffee come from
The subtitles "Hey, I know what you're thinking" for "Jetzt will ich aber nicht gehört haben, was Sie vielleicht gedacht haben" unfortunately does not capture the intricacies of that sentence. A more literal translation would have been "I chose to overhear what you might have thought" implying "because otherwise I would have to report you to the authorities and you'd be in big trouble". I know these subtitles were not created by Andong, so this is no criticism, I just thought it might be interesting to non-German speakers.
That's an incorrect translation, overheard means something different. The translation should be '' I chose not to hear what you might have thought. Overheard ist schwer zu uebersetzen, bedeutet so was wie zufaellig gehoert, aus einem Gespraech woran man nicht beteiligt war.
The food history videos are among the best on your channel. Thanks for the great content.
The coffee filter was invented in east Germany... Saxony has a forgotten coffee culture as long & rich as Vienna, Italy, France & so on.
Seriously? That was Melitta right? I thought it was a western German company. My pack of filters is labelled as being made in Minden.
@@simonh6371 Yes it was Melitta Bentz & she was born in Dresden where she also invented it & started her business... Wikipedia: "The fast-growing company eventually relocated in 1929 to Minden in eastern Westphalia as no more satisfactory production facilities could be found in Dresden."
@@n_other_1604 Thanks I did look on wiki afterwards and found out she invented it in Dresden. I know Minden pretty well actually, I was stationed in Herford for 2 years. Used to go to some club there with German friends.
As someone who is partially of Vietnamese ancestry, I greatly appreciate this video!
Well I would say if people went to protest because of the lack of quality coffee their lives were not as bad as others would try to convince you.
Apparently East German women were having better sex life than a lot of women in other Western countries
i always love your food history videos, so happy to see this in my sub box
It is weird to say "things started to look real good" during French colonial rule, maybe for the French rulers and coffee plantation owners, i guess. Saying the Vietnam War was devastating for coffee industry to some extent is true, but we had a lot of important stuff to worry about, fancy bean juice is not one of them. Honestly, if there were bombs exploding around you it wouldn't stop you from having your daily morning coffee enema. Tone deaf is the most i can say about this video.
There’s only so much information you can include in a 15 minute video. my priority is to share this under-told story. you can’t reasonably expect me to turn this into a discourse about colonialism and Socialism and still keep it watchable. I just like most recipe videos that includes meat will not discuss its consequences of climate change, and the unsustainability of the meat industry
@@mynameisandong Weak excuse, no one asking you to do that, i don't know what your bias are (anti-communist?) but the tone is completely wrong on that part, solely focus on coffee and ignore the suffering part of the people. There are youtube recipe videos that discuss sustainability of the ingredients. Completely ignore the Vietnamese farmer's suffer (at that point they didn't even know what communism were) but went great length to describe the Germans need their coffee like their life depends on it. It's not that hard to write a couple empathic lines of script. I think you should take this criticism and write a better script next time, or just forget about writing a history piece because this one is terrible.
@@mynameisandong no time to mention the colonial plantations were not in fact “looking real good” for its workers. But enough time to claim that the socialist Vietnamese state deprioritizing coffee growing in order to literally feed their population and drag them out of poverty was “mismanagement “ It seems like it’s actually just your bias showing. It’s your script and you get to choose to speak as much or as little about any matter as you see fit. The fact that you did not is telling
I have to admit I never heard of vietnamese coffee before. But I will definitely try it! And most importantly:
Thanks for yet another amazing food history video. I laughed, I learned and I will definitely test my east german colleagues on their history knowledge tomorrow!
Vietnam
youtubeeem.com/9QJfjcreTW5
st my east german colleagues on their history knowledge
A tip: Don't be fooled and do not drink too much at once because it tasted like a tasty dessert, the authentic drink is quite strong. I made that mistake way too many times...
I got hooked on Viet coffee a few years ago. My favorite is still a blend of 50/50% Robusta /Arabica, as I think they complement each other. Robusta has a rougher, more chocolaty flavor, wheres Arabica has an appealing floral taste, but can tend towed an unpleasant acidity. The blend tends to tame the excess of either alone. IMHO
Great video!!! Very interesting story and Andong‘s famous storytelling 😊 Thank you!
During the planned economy period in Vietnam, which lasted until 1985-1986, the Government of Vietnam also limited people's access to coffee, and they did come up with the same thing that GDR did- mixing all kind of stuffs, from soy beans, corn,... to areca nut extraction to recreate the taste and smell of strong coffee. That very method was brought to a higher level by Trung Nguyên, the most well known Vietnamese coffee brand, which turns it into a million dollar business, and they still continue that "blending" until today. That's why people with coffee knowledge, or those who have access/tasted real coffee, are turning their back on Trung Nguyên, and show their support to smaller coffee producers/brands that offer the real deal.
Most of the audience of this video they don't bother understand the fact. East Germany coffee style almost destroyed our coffee heritage from the French.
Tụi khán giả kênh này có hiểu gì về lịch sử phát triển của cafe Việt Nam mình đâu. Đa phần thông tin xàm
@@cuthomas4664 hello, Sir! im small YT blogger and now i'm making a video about Vietnam coffe, where are you leave can i ask you a few question about hostory of coffee?
What an interesting video! I loved the Vietnamese iced coffee. I had no idea about it‘s connection to German history. Thanks for this great content.
I recently had some Vietnamese Specialty Coffee and it was quite enjoyable. I do enjoy Ethiopian and Columbian Coffee more but it had some nice deep flavours though not as complex as higher grown coffees
Vietnam is the definition of bounce back , having to defend themselves against invaders not for decades but centuries. Not just Just mainland Vietnamese but all Vietnamese are just downright resilient people.
Heya Andong! (east) German viewer here! I was expecting something else from this video. As most of the "Chinese" restaurants where I live are managed by people with Vietnamese origin, I wondered if you could shine a light on why so many Vietnamese came to the GDR.
Nevertheless, very interesting stuff!^^ Me likey!^^ Thank you!
It is possible that the Chinese restaurants run by Vietnamese might have some traces of Chinese bloodline or are Chinese who lived in Vietnam before immigrating. In Vietnam, these people are referred to as the Hoa people and are an ethnic group in Vietnam.
@@aznmochibunny Nope. It has to do with the Vietnamese guest workers in East Germany. After the wall of the Berlin Wall most of them were laid off when the factories they worked in closed down and (IIRC) Vietnam wouldn't take them back before their contracted term ended. The same time saw a large spike in demand for chinese-style cuisine.
they came to study and to work. The only type of immigration that Germany needs and also a beneficial arrangement for the migrants themselves. I would change the 100.000s of Afghans, Syrians etc for Vietnamese people, if it would be possible.
Also in the West and also with Thai cuisine. Most generic Asia Imbisse are still managed by people named Nguyen and Tran. The first Asian restaurant in the town near my village was Korean with the typical westernised Chinese dishes and Korean ones. A local Hotel owner's son married a Korean back then.
RUclips: "so, do you support the left or right wing?"
Andong: "I like food"
There is also a weird kind of coffee in Vietnam, mostly used by the Communist forces in South Vietnam during the war. They used rice, break them into powder, put on heated pan until gaining black or brown color, add some water and sugar then boil this mixture and serve. They won the war with some kind of weird drink like that.
It's the trick to spare coffee. People still do that but with soy bean and it is looked down upon.
This has got to be your best documentary yet! Well, maybe just the funniest! Thank you!
In Malaysia and Singapore, we have a coffee mixture made by roasting together cheaper Robusta coffee beans, wheat flour, sugar and magarine. Known locally as kopi kampung (koepee karmpoong), it is popular especially among older people. Its creamy and caramalised taste coupled with higher levels of caffeine plus cheaper price are unrivalled. Served straight or with sugar or with sweetened condensed milk, it goes well with half boiled eggs (flavoured with soy sauce and white pepper powder) and toast with kaya (kar yar/egg coconut cream) jam for breakfast or tea.
Putting deep dives connecting history and culture back in your food videos again? I am so here for it!
Hell yeah been looking forward to the next Andong food history video
Your entertaining and humorous presentation of this coffee history was most enjoyable.
What a great story. Thank you so much for sharing!
😊 as Vietnamese from highland where coffee is cultivated, I didnt know about this history part, thank you Andong ❤❤❤
Vietnamese are recent settler colonists in the highland area brought by French colonials to genocide and replace the indigenous Montagnard peoples and take over their lands
LOVED the video!!! Thank you for investing the time in research and making of the video
So the Meika "Coffee" is the same as what American Civil War soldiers drank as "Coffee"... Fascinating connection/history.
1:05 that music had me thinking Mark Rober was about to join in and start explaining it
Kevin McLeod and all the other musicians...
Nowadays no one even seems to want to credit them anymore for their Creative Commons work that keeps youtube alive.
Glad you're doing those kind of videos again, I missed that!
These history videos are the reason I subbed. Keep it up ma dude.👍
Back in 2018 I visited Hanoi and Saigon and in both cities I was able to get phin coffee while eating breakfast. In 2022 I visited Saigon again and phin coffee was nowhere to be found. Every coffee shop was using espresso machines like in the US. Life is getting faster there so small things like that have gone away.
There still a lot of place use the phin. You just didn't know it. It's fine
Well you can ask for phin coffee and the shop will serve you though
i don't know how this is even possible, i've been to vietnam in 2022 as well and i got phin coffee everwhere.
@@NR-fd9wv as Vietnamese, I confirm !!!
This was so cool to watch! I had no idea about the history of Vietnamese coffee!
Great Video Andong (: Still astounded by the complex colonial circumstances that brought Beverages like Tea, Coffee & Spirits around the World. Thanks for doing really needed educational work! Keep it coming!
This was such a fun story, glad to have you back!
This is one of your best videos, Andong! A dozen minutes very well spent on my end.
5:14 Those east germany packs looks great.
I had the pleasure of tasting amazing arabica coffee in Dal Lat. So delicious...
The classic vietnamese coffee is mostly 100% robusta and despite being super strong it's pretty boring taste wise. Didn't get used to the sweetened condensed milk though...
It’s actually Soviet Russian Truck - ZIL 130 that you used in video multiple times, but it doesn’t make the story bad.
Fascinating. I'd always assumed that Vietnam's coffee had something to do with French colonialism (like their pastries and sandwiches).
This was a very educational -- and entertaining -- video. Thanks Andong!
I know how much work these videos are, but you have a talent to tell this very interesting stories in a funny manner and this brings so muuuuch value to RUclips. Please keep up with this! Kellogg’s was so far my favourite and still use this in smalltalk conversations 😅
8:22 how did the host get to the conclusion that capitalism had won? both Ethiopia and Angola had just gain independence as Communist nations.
I absolutely love these videos! They’re so informative and entertaining, really well made my guy
Very interesting. Your presentation was excellent.
Yeeeeeess!! More food history and the familiar Andong music!
Thanks for this food history Andong. It was really fascinating and I enjoyed it a great deal! 🙂 Please keep making these sort of episodes along with all of your other very enjoyable and informative videos. I always learn something when I watch your videos.
If you call Vietnamese being exploited and forced to cultivate many plants good times, I don't know what to say.
So interesting! Thanks for the little history lesson man
Great video! Love these food history stories ❤
Your historical videos are next level, mega Alda!
I stopped for the coffee, went off having learned something new. Thanks for the video!
Fascinating video! you’re the king of food history videos!
I believe that title will forever belong to Max from Tasting History, but thanks :D
I don't think I can ever watch any of videos again.
Nice video (buen video xuxetumare)
Cheers from Phu Khôn, Vietnam
what a cool and engaging story teller and story :) tysm
this was a very fun episode!
This was very enjoyable and brought back very old (65 years ago( memories when we escaped Hungary in 1956 with one imitation leather suitcase and in the suitcase was a packet of coffee because no coffee = no life..
GREAT VIDEO!!! KEEP THEM UP
Great vid, thanks for sourcing and squeezing in so much old footage, loved it! Actually I knew about the East German connection from a German documentary miniseries ''Mahlzeit DDR'' which has a whole episode about the coffee problem, but I didn't know it had been started under French colonial rule
Liked and subscribed
Your studio and the whole video asthetic is so relaxing and vibes. keep up the great work! from the netherlands.
Need more food history docus from you!
Vietnamese coffee with condensed milk is to die for. I'm really considering of buying that special cup for preparation of Vietnamese coffee the next time I'm in Berlin.
Thanks for letting us know this information
I love your food history videos, please do more.
Great video !!! Andong, as in "Zhongwen mingzi ma"? PiiiinYiiin baby 💖💖
I love your food history videos. Keep them coming!
Sweet Video!
I just love how this video made me feel good about coffee. I love coffee in any case and vietnam style is in the top 5 of all coffee styles.
I am smarter than yesterday, so thanks again Andong!
what happened to the GDR contracts the Vietnamese had signed? Did the reunified FRG agree to cancel them, how did Vietnam escape paying for its contractual obligations?
The luxury of protesting about coffee insted of housing, food and heat.
Andong Wonderful. As a Teutonophile, foodie, and history nut this little gem escaped my notice before. It's one of those tiny details that gets lost in the shuffle. It was also fun seeing the old East German coffee packets. I've noticed that ex-colonies in the warmer parts of the world all use canned milk. Many famous drinks (the first I learned of was Thai Tea) use canned milk as an ingredient Tbank you for this. 🤓 all the best, Jim Oaxaca Mexico
Speaking as a Vietnamese, I do think our use of condense milk is more of a result f wartime ration. In fact, here we do raise our own dairy cattle and have even started to experiment with cheese making
Great video. If you and Adam Ragusea did a colab video or project of somekind it would be an epic concoction of food history and science.
I love how you spin willingness to use exploitative labor in colonised 3rd world countries as a capitalist positive, while condemning the self sufficient policies of more socialist regimes. "plantations started popping up and things looked great" is a lovely take. also love how the crash in vietnamese production is of course the "communist"s fault and not the century of imperial oppression and war. tremendous.
I also wondered what he was smoking before making this video. It started off well but he lost me with his romanticised view of the French "presence"....lol they dont even call it "colonialism" anymore. I'm sure not many Vietnamese cried or were sad when the French left. I wonder if the person making the video has Vietnamese ancestry (at least its hardly noticeable when you look at him), if he does, he should know better.
When I go to my Chinese grocery, I always wonder why there’s so many types of Vietnamese coffee? Like why they are so popular?
Why not? Vietnamese coffee has some of the best robusta mixes out there. (And no, i won't suffer the Western coffee snobs looking down on robusta gladly)
Apart from Indonesia I think it's the only country Asia which grows coffee. China doesn't grow it at all.
I absolutely LOVE that 80s Kaffee Mix bag design!
Thanks Vietnam for producing and originating this blend.
Great video! Also, I noticed the word "Melange" was written on the RONDO pack... "The Spice Must Flow.."
I used to live down the road from Röstfein coffee roastery in Magdeburg in (former) East Germany as a uni student. Great smells.
Love these kind of history videos you do. I'd suggest swapping out the thumbnail with something a little more striking so that it catches the eye of more people as it deserves to.
It's such an irony that the GDR actually invested MASSIVELY in fixing their coffee production. (Also impressive progress in roasting technology)
Shortly before the collapse the coffee was actually ok I heard. But NOBODY bought it because it had such a terrible reputation.
so... basically the whole German unification was because of coffee... wow
@@am05mhz The west German care packets and the prestige of that coffee played an undeniably huge role indeed.
For the GDR coffee was a huge deal because it made them look terrible.
I don't want to overrate this aspect. But it was certainly a not negligible contribution to the downfall.
I watched a documentary on this, one of 3 in the MDR series Mahlzeit DDR. If I remember rightly the 50/50 Mischung was so terrible and people said it was a waste of what little coffee they had to mix it and make it undrinkable, so they just went back to selling it pure at a higher price, and drinking less coffee. I would do the same.
@@TilmanBaumann Volksaufputschmittel Kaffee.
Thank you, that was a really good content and very interesting.
As a Vietnamese learning German, I'd have to say, if the Germans asked again, we'd be happy to give them our coffee. I mean I would.
Some points to say here: coffee was introduced to Vietnam by the French with zones designated for planting. They were largely the same method of production until 1986. Coffee industry in Vietnam distributed heavily in Central Highland (South Vietnam), so it was heavily impacted by the war and its consequence (labour shortage, bureaucracy led to low yeld, no market for coffee product...) After 1990, the coffee industry have been taking off again, largely thanks to the privatization of farm land back to the farmers and open market. East Germany had went a great length to help Vietnamese communist goverment, but East Germany had very limited impact on Vietnamese coffee industry. We owned it thanks to the French, people like Alexader Yersin!
These are your best kinds of vids tbh