The roastery’s coffee nerds started pulling out the beans, sniffing and chewing them as they set up a cupping, the industry-standard way coffee professionals taste and rate coffee. How would this liberica stand up to the rest of OZO’s offerings? We ground the beans, poured them into glasses, and sniffed. “Weird… very sweet… winey,” a staff member pronounced. I cautiously offered that I smelled brownie batter. “Oh yeah,” another staffer replied. He pulled me over to a framed family tree of popular coffee varieties and pointed out that liberica wasn’t even on there. It’s in a category all its own.

This distinction is what first caught the attention of Hana Choi, one of the founders of 96B. Born in Vietnam, Choi grew up preparing to take over the family business (making packaging materials), but she loved coffee—a hobby she shared with her father. The two would buy fresh beans to roast at home and visit neighbors who farmed coffee to tour their gardens. Several years after graduating with a degree in international business, Choi told her parents she was going to work in coffee instead.

In 2015, while studying at SPC Coffee Academy in Seoul, Korea, Choi read a book that overviewed the different species of coffee beans. Of course there was arabica, the premium bean served at almost all upscale coffee shops. And there was robusta, the less-prestigious, higher-caffeinated bean used primarily in instant coffee mixes, and which makes up more than 95 percent of Vietnam’s prodigious coffee crop. But there was another species she’d never heard of: liberica. “The way [the author] put it was like, ‘When you try it once, it’s a life-long lasting experience,’” Choi says. “But there was no additional information. Just that it’s very unique and very special. So that stuck in my head.”

When Choi started 96B in 2016, Ho Chi Minh City had only a handful of specialty coffee shops. They roasted arabica beans imported from places like Guatemala and Ethiopia and generally avoided robusta, which had a reputation for lacking the former’s subtlety and depth of flavor. But Choi wanted to champion Vietnamese-grown coffee and invested in expensive roasting equipment to improve the quality and variety of the brew. 

That’s when she started searching for liberica. The name is a reference to Liberia, the West African country where the species likely originated, but she was pretty sure it grew in Vietnam. With some internet searching, she found photos of “a very big, giant tree” with huge leaves that looked completely unlike arabica, which often grows to just six feet. Most farmers she spoke with had never seen trees like that, but one recognized them, saying he thought they grew in a warmer, lower-elevation region. He had a relative there who called it “jackfruit coffee.”

Choi drove down with friends and met the relative, who toured them around and pointed out towering trees—in fact, Coffea liberica—growing by the village gate. People used the trees as fencing and shade for other crops, but he’d never tasted or harvested the fruits. Choi had never tasted liberica coffee either, but she paid the farmers to harvest it for her.

Working with a poorly documented and relatively unexplored bean meant starting from scratch in many ways. The first year Choi made liberica coffee, she didn’t think it was good enough to serve on its own; she only offered it as a blend with local arabica beans. But she was determined. She and her cofounder, Thai Dang, who joined 96B in 2017, invested in better harvesting and production methods and tried out different roasts and preparations, such as fermenting the coffee cherries for one, two, and three days to find the ideal duration. They paid for clean water to wash the beans and for raised nets so the farmers didn’t have to dry liberica coffee cherries on the ground. They learned that, despite many coffee aficionados’ preference for super “fresh” coffee, liberica seemed to get better with age—both the green and roasted beans.

Thanks to these iterative improvements, Choi and Dang started selling unblended liberica coffee in early 2021. Today, they sell bags of the beans to coffee distributors and direct to consumers. “It really shines in milk-based drinks,” Dang says, “because it’s so sweet.” The 96B café menu now features the Liberica Experience: a mini cappuccino and a mini espresso to taste it with and without milk, plus an option to add a mini cold brew. 

Lately, Choi and Dang have been garnering attention for helping put this bean on the map, and for celebrating Vietnamese coffee more broadly. The New York Times included 96B in their guide to the best coffee in Ho Chi Minh City (though, notably, with no mention of liberica), and the celebrated specialty roaster Blue Bottle has offered liberica at one-off tastings in Kyoto, Japan, and Seoul after a visit to 96B. But Choi and Dang are no longer liberica’s sole heralds. Other farmers and roasters in Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines are now selling the beans, and some barista competitors have gone on to win awards with brews made from it.

But there’s a more unsettling trend that could soon bolster liberica’s growth: the climate crisis. Arabica is a notoriously finicky crop. It prefers cool highlands, and across the world the plants are succumbing to excessive heat and drought. Major coffee players such as Nestlé and World Coffee Research are exploring ways to breed sturdier and higher-quality robusta; some celebrated coffee regions, such as Minas Gerais, Brazil, have even replanted with robusta entirely. 

Liberica, however, naturally thrives in warmer regions, and its deep roots find water more easily than arabica and possibly robusta, though very little research has been conducted on liberica. Dang and Choi have visited coffee farms where drought has killed off arabica and robusta but left liberica trees hale and healthy—a promising sign for the bean’s commercial future.

At OZO, as we began our cupping, I suspected 96B’s liberica might score poorly. Choi has had less than a decade to perfect her process, and the scoring method we’d be using was developed specifically for arabica beans. Plus, coffee drinkers’ palates and expectations have been shaped by decades of drinking arabica. Would it have been more fair to the beans—and to 96B—to try the liberica in a cappuccino or cold brew?

Instead, the staff simply poured hot water over the ground beans. After a brief wait, we dipped our spoons, sipped, and began discussing: “Very smooth, almost no bitterness,” one remarked. Everyone agreed it was very sweet. Some compared the taste to black sesame cookies; others to hoisin sauce or even duck. For me, the strongest notes were of melon. And since the coffee wasn’t as strong as arabica or robusta (liberica seems to have a lower caffeine content), the experience felt a bit like sipping tea.

Each coffee was scored based on criteria such as acidity, body, and sweetness (which everyone ranked 10 out of 10) before the whole lot was averaged for a score out of 100. The single-origin coffees OZO sells usually score between 85.5 and 88; the liberica beans scored just above 86, holding their own against arabicas carefully sourced from around the world. As we finished up, the staff encouraged employees who’d been busy roasting in another room to try the last drops of the pours we’d prepared. “It’s not going to overtake Ethiopia,” one of the roasters said. But it’s “approachable, complex, unique…It doesn’t remind me of anything else.”