Anyone can drink the coffee. Go and watch it happen.
Which Hanoi workshop pours six brews and which pours three. What a Medellín finca morning costs with transport in. Whether the Materuni waterfall day is really a coffee tour. Reviews of the coffee tours, tastings and barista classes you can book anywhere in the world.
A Hanoi kitchen, a Medellín finca, hot sand in Cappadocia, a Kilimanjaro waterfall.
Four coffee mornings that travellers keep coming back from happy. What each one costs, and what happens in the hours you book.
01The one to book firstVietnamese Coffee Culture and Coffee Making ClassRoast, grind and pour your own in a Hoi An courtyard, ending with the egg coffee everyone flies home talking about.
02The finca morningCoffee Tour with Transport, Snacks and TastingsOut of Medellín with transport and lunch: picking, the wet mill, the drying beds, then cupping what the farm sent to auction.
03The strangest brewSand-Brewed Turkish Coffee WorkshopCappadocian coffee simmered in hot volcanic sand instead of on a flame. Twenty minutes, and you will never make it any other way again.
04The whole-day versionMateruni Waterfalls, coffee tour & Kikuletwa Hot SpringsMateruni village on the Kilimanjaro slopes: the picking-to-pounding song, then the falls and the hot springs on the way down.
Vietnam turns coffee into a class, and the class is the best value on this site.
Nowhere else hands you the phin, the condensed milk and the whisked egg yolk and lets you make all three yourself. Three cities do it, they do it differently, and none of them charge much.
Three kinds of coffee day, and they are not interchangeable.
A farm tour walks you through picking, pulping and drying and ends at a cupping table. A tasting skips the field and pours six cups side by side. A class puts the pot in your hands. Pick the one you actually want before you book.
Six countries that will hand you a cup you cannot get at home.
The Vietnamese highlands and the phin, the Antioquia hills above Medellín, Kona and Capitol Hill, the Kilimanjaro slopes, Turkish sand, and the Costa Rican wet mills an hour from San José.
Colombia sells the coffee morning better than anyone, because the farm is close.
Everything in Colombia →
Half an hour out of Medellín the hills start, and on them are farms that will walk you from the cherry to the cup before lunch. Salento does it in the wax-palm valley, Cartagena does it over a tasting bar. These three carry more travellers than anything else in the country.
A working finca, start to finish
Pick into the basket, watch the pulper, stand in the drying beds and taste what the farm graded that week. The good ones send you home able to explain washed versus natural without notes.
Medellín, and back by dinner
Comuna cable cars on the way up, a farm in the Antioquia hills, lunch at the finca table. The whole thing fits inside one day and still leaves the evening free.
Salento and the Cocora palms
The wax palms are the tallest in the world and the farms sit beneath them. It is a longer day than Medellín and the photographs are the reason people take it anyway.
The coffee experiences more travellers book than any others.
Every coffee tour we have reviewed →Hanoi kitchens, Turkish sand, Kilimanjaro waterfalls and one Colombian finca that has been running the same route for years.
1
Vietnamese Coffee Culture and Coffee Making Class
Join Tan, Le, and their family team for a hands-on Hoi An coffee class. You’ll trace coffee from crop to cup, use a Phin filter, prepare five local styles, and take home recipes, skills, and a small gift. The workshop is English-friendly, family-run, and limited to 10 people.
From · $14
Read our review →
2
Hanoi Coffee Experience: 6 Brews, 9 Recipes & 3 Liquor Tastings
from $17
3
Coffee Tour with Transport, Snacks and Tastings
from $80
4
Turkish Coffee Making and Fortune Telling Workshop
from $23
5
Hanoi Coffee Workshop: Taste Salt, Coconut and Egg Coffee
from $16
6
Vienna for Food Lovers: Cafés, Markets & Austrian Cuisine
from $159
7
Salt Coffee Workshop Awake Your Senses With 6 Brews
from $23
8
Sand-Brewed Turkish Coffee Workshop
from $12
The farm morning: picked, pulped, dried and poured before lunch.
Coffee is a fruit, and almost nobody who drinks it has seen one. A farm tour fixes that in about four hours: the cherry off the branch, the pulper, the fermentation tank, the drying patio and finally a table of small cups you slurp from a spoon. Highland mornings are cool and often wet, so bring shoes you do not mind ruining.
What a coffee morning costs, from a $10 class to a private finca day.
Every tour on the site, grouped by price. Coffee is the cheapest good experience in most of these countries, and the gap between the bands buys transport and lunch more often than better coffee.
City workshops, tastings and cafe crawls. Hanoi and Istanbul sit almost entirely in this band.
The full farm day: pickup, the fields, the mill, lunch at the finca and the drive back.
Private guides, helicopter-and-plantation days and the estates that only take small groups.
Three cups you have to travel for.
Espresso is the same argument in every city. A yolk whisked into coffee, a pot simmered in volcanic sand and green beans roasted on the floor in front of you are not.
Egg coffee
A wartime shortage of fresh milk left a Hanoi barman whisking egg yolk with condensed milk instead, and the result floats on the coffee like warm custard. It is served in a bowl of hot water to keep the top from setting. Every workshop in the Old Quarter teaches it, and most throw in salt coffee and coconut coffee in the same sitting.
- 1Hanoi Coffee Workshop: Taste Salt, Coconut and Egg Coffee★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 1,286 reviews
- 2Egg coffee & Course on 4 traditional types of Viet coffee★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 487 reviews
- 3Vietnamese Street Food Tour with Egg Coffee★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 315 reviews
Coffee brewed on sand
The cezve goes into a tray of hot sand rather than onto a flame, so the heat comes from every side at once and the foam rises three times before it is poured. Workshops run twenty to forty minutes, usually end with the cup turned over for a fortune reading, and cost less than a museum ticket.
- 1Turkish Coffee Making and Fortune Telling Workshop★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 1,308 reviews
- 2Sand-Brewed Turkish Coffee Workshop★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 745 reviews
- 3Turkish Coffee Making and Fortune Telling Workshop★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 451 reviews
The coffee ceremony
In Addis Ababa the whole thing happens on the floor in front of you: green beans washed and roasted in a pan, passed round to smell, pounded in a mortar, brewed in a clay jebena and poured three times, each round weaker and more talked over than the last. It takes an hour and it is not a performance for tourists.
- 1Ethiopian Culinary Tour – Market, Food, Coffee Ceremony & more★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 65 reviews
- 2Market Tour and Cooking Class with a Coffee Ceremony at a Home in Addis Ababa★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 32 reviews
- 3Ethiopian Cooking Class and Coffee Ceremony with a Local in Addis with transfers★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 14 reviews
Four coffee mornings that sell out before you land.
Most tastings can be arranged the night before. These four cannot: the kitchens are small, the mills only run during harvest, and the minibuses seat eight.
- 01Materuni Waterfalls, coffee tour & Kikuletwa Hot SpringsOne Chagga village, a handful of guides and a shared minibus each morning. The falls path is slippery through the long rains, so the dry-season dates go first.
- 02Hacienda Doka Coffee Experience TourThe wet mill only runs while the cherries are coming in, roughly November to March. Outside harvest you get the machinery standing still.
- 03Hanoi Coffee Workshop: Taste Salt, Coconut and Egg CoffeeOld Quarter kitchens fit six or eight people around one counter. Weekend sittings in Hanoi are usually gone a week out.
- 04Big Island Highlights: Coffee, Volcano, Black Sands & WaterfallThe sand tray takes four cezves at a time, so classes run in tiny groups and Cappadocia has very few of them.
Harvest is the only part of the coffee year you cannot book around.
Farms run tours all year, but picking happens in a window, and outside it you walk past empty drying beds. Colombia is heaviest October to December with a second smaller pass in April. Costa Rica runs November to March, Vietnam November to January, Ethiopia and Kenya October to January, and the Kilimanjaro slopes July to October. Cities never close: a Hanoi workshop or an Istanbul sand brew is the same in any month.
By city - where the tours actually start
By kind of morning - field, cup, kitchen or crawl
Hanoi, Hoi An, Da Nang, Da Lat, Saigon: one country, five different cups.
Da Nang
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