Why not the phin?
After years of working with coffee, we found ourselves surrounded by brewers designed for specialty coffee.
Yet one of the most familiar brewing objects in Vietnam was rarely part of that conversation.
The Vietnamese phin was right there.
Why did we stop
choosing the phin?
When we started brewing specialty coffee, we found ourselves reaching for other brewers.
With a traditional phin, the flow could become a slow drip, making it difficult to control the brewing speed and repeat the same result.
When air could not move freely through the space between the filter plate and the phin body, the flow could also stop. In practice, the filter sometimes had to be lifted before the coffee would continue flowing.
Fine particles could also accumulate around small openings, making the flow slower and leaving more visible sediment in the cup.
The everyday Vietnamese cup
The idea did not come only from specialty coffee.
It also came from the Vietnamese coffee we drink every day, whether black or with condensed milk.
We wanted a cleaner cup, with less visible sediment and a clearer expression of the coffee’s flavor.
And we wanted to brew without paper
Paper changes the character of a brew. We wanted to explore whether the Vietnamese phin could work without a paper filter, while still giving us a cleaner and more expressive cup.
So the question became:
What would need to change for the Vietnamese phin to become a paperless, cleaner and more controllable brewing tool?
“What if we could make a phin without paper, and still make a clean cup?”
When I told Trương Duy Phương that I wanted to make an improved phin, he gave me another question.
How could water move through the coffee bed without paper? How could fine particles be handled without adding another filter layer? And how should the filter plate be designed?
Phương became an important source of ideas in the early design process, especially around the shape and structure of the filter plate. From there, I began working through the technical calculations and geometry that would become Phin S.
The answer was not
another filter.
The idea was not to invent another brewer.
It was to rethink an object that was already familiar.
We did not want to add a paper filter to solve the problem. We wanted to redesign the geometry of the brewer itself.
The shape could remain recognisable. The way it moved water, air and fine particles could be reconsidered.
QUESTION
Why not use the Vietnamese phin for specialty coffee and everyday brewing?
RETHINK
Reconsider the openings, filter geometry and air path beneath the filter.
BUILD
Turn the idea into a paperless brewing system.
Making it real
was different.
A drawing is easy to imagine. Making it real is different.
The first design led to technical discussions, manufacturing decisions, tooling and repeated testing.
What initially looked like a simple aluminum brewer revealed layers of engineering that were not obvious from the outside.
More waiting.
More testing.
The first mold took longer than expected. The process required patience, technical problem solving and repeated waiting before the first sample arrived.
DESIGN
Develop the first concept and technical drawings.
TOOLING
Turn the design into a production mold and work through the technical details.
FIRST SAMPLE
The first sample finally arrived and could be used without additional mold modification.
Not to replace
the phin.
We did not want to replace the identity of the Vietnamese phin.
We wanted to understand it better.
We wanted to see whether its familiar form could be reconsidered for specialty coffee, everyday Vietnamese coffee and paperless brewing.
We wanted to rethink how it moves water and air, how it handles fine particles and how its geometry could create a cleaner cup without relying on paper.
That became Phin S.
“I think curiosity about life and coffee has always made me look closer, ask why, and wonder how things could be better. That curiosity, and the desire to keep improving, is what led me to Phin S.”
Innovation can begin
with a better question.
Phin S was born from something familiar.
A Vietnamese brewing object. A different way of looking at it. And the decision to see how far that question could go.
Sometimes innovation begins by looking at something familiar and asking a better question.
