Written by Roseanne Periera, photos by Jeremy Lee

One very cold day in 2023, I ventured to the Mill City Farmers Market with a singular mission in mind – to taste my first egg coffee. Online, the taste of an egg coffee has been described a few different ways, like a liquid version of: a Cadbury crème egg, tiramisu, meringue, or flan.

The drink was created in Hanoi, Vietnam in 1946 by a cappuccino-loving bartender at the Sofitel Legend Metropole Hotel. Fresh milk was not widely available at the time, so he replicated the cappuccino foam by using egg yolks, sugar, and added sweetened condensed milk to the drink.

At the market, I found Càphin [pronounced caffeine] Minneapolis in their coffee trailer, and realized that many others had also heard the Vietnamese coffee drink call.

Savio Nguyen, who along with his wife Jenny, founded the business also remembers the massive response in those early days at the market. Seeing the long line, he told the staff, “Hey guys, don’t look up!” urging them to not rush and just work through it.

The coffee trailer was the Nguyens’ way of gauging interest and testing the market. Now, Càphin Minneapolis operates at MCFM along with their brick and mortar cafe storefront located in Linden Hills. Just last month, they opened a second storefront location in downtown Minneapolis’ Kickernick Building (M-F, 7am-3pm)!

At their storefront locations, they sell a gift box for customers who want to brew their own Vietnamese coffee drinks at home, and recently even began selling their own beans under the 11°57N Coffee label (a reference to the latitude that runs through one of Vietnam’s most celebrated coffee regions.)

ORIGIN STORY

Back in 2022, the Nguyens, who are second-generation Vietnamese Americans, were visiting relatives in Seattle, Washington. While there, they looked for coffee shops to go to and noticed a few that specialized in drinks found in Vietnam. They were intrigued, and during the flight home, started dreaming about the possibility of offering these drinks in the Twin Cities.

The phin is the traditional brewing device of Vietnamese coffee. At the farmers market, baristas use a giant phin drip in order to batch the drinks while still brewing them in an authentic manner. Nguyen describes the phin as a combination of pour over and French press, but also as representative of Vietnamese coffee culture as a whole. Whereas in the U.S., takeout coffee is very popular, Nguyen says that in Vietnam, a community coffee culture prevails. Often, for instance, people order coffee and while the phin drips, gather with friends before heading to work. Nguyen says that many coffee drinkers there don’t take the first sip until the phin finishes, which can take from 3-7 minutes until it’s fully extracted.

DISCOVERING FLAVORS

Part of what the Nguyens are sharing with the Twin Cities are the flavors from their childhood. “It’s been fun seeing a part of what we grew up with that was so standard for us as kids and allowing people to discover it,” says Savio. Flavors like ube and pandan were part of cakes and other treats. Chè, a dessert served cold, for example, contains tapioca strings or balls, coconut cream, pandan, and red beans.

He credits ube’s vibrant purple color and pandan’s green for part of their popularity. The Nguyens decided to incorporate these flavors into the coffee drinks they served, spending a lot of time tinkering to get just the right flavor, and not ones that tasted artificial or alcohol-heavy, which many extracts can.

Càphin Minneapolis’s limited indoor winter market menu typically includes an ube matcha as well as three phin drip drinks, available hot or iced. These showcase different parts of Vietnam: ca phe sua da, the classic Vietnamese coffee made with sweetened condensed milk, was created in Saigon (now, Ho Chi Minh City) in the southern part of Vietnam; ca phe muoi, Vietnamese coffee topped with a layer of salted caramel cold foam, originated in central Vietnam, and ca phe trung, the egg coffee, is, as mentioned earlier, from Hanoi.

MARKET KISMET

Savio credits the warm reception by Mill City Farmers Market patrons with many of the opportunities that have come Càphin’s way. “That’s how we got into our first brick and mortar,” he says, explaining how a previous tenant of their Linden Hills space lived near the Mill City Farmers Market and saw that massive line when Càphin’s coffee trailer first appeared, witnessing how popular it was from the getgo. The individual approached them about a possible sublease for the Linden Hills space, even pledging support to help them eventually get a lease of their own.

“Every community that we go into, that’s what we do everything for,” says Nguyen. “We can build the community around coffee; we can share our heritage through that coffee… People are excited to try it, respectful of our heritage.”

Reflecting on how far they’ve come, he adds, “We couldn’t really do all of that without that first opportunity that Mill City Farmers Market gave us.”

What a journey. Back in 2023, when I finally got to the front of the line and tasted my first egg coffee, I was pleasantly surprised by its smoothness. It was sweet, but not too sweet. I held the warm cup between my hands and sipped as I wandered the market, feeling that now that I’d found one treasure, more would likely appear.

Find Càphin on April 4th & 18th from 9am-1pm inside the Mill City Museum. They will be joining us without their trailer this summer – look for them in a tent on the new expansion area between S 2nd St and Washington Ave, near Red Wolf Chai!