From Vietnam to an Apartment Café: An IT Professional’s Unexpected Journey Into Coffee

The Pursuit of Better Coffee

The starting point was a Murphy Richards machine, a small entry-level appliance his wife had received as a corporate gift. He started making lattes at home and, to his own surprise, found himself drawn not just to the drink but to the process itself, the measuring, steaming, and small rituals that came with it. But the coffee never quite tasted the way it tasted in cafés, and that gap refused to leave him alone.

"It gave me some sort of calmness. A meditation, almost. But it still didn't taste the way it tasted in cafés. So there was obviously something wrong with what I was doing."

So he started reading about origins and roast profiles, and about the history of Indian coffee, which he had been drinking without ever really understanding. In that process, he came across James Hoffmann, discovered Indian roasters he had never heard of, and slowly began to realise how much lay beyond what he had been making at home.

Slowly, the setup around him began to grow: a grinder, a proper scale, pour-over equipment, and beans arriving from roasters across the country as he kept trying to close the gap between what he was making and what he had begun to imagine was possible.

Of everything he learned, the grinder took the longest to get right because, like most beginners, he treated it as something to spend modestly on and revisit later, only to realise that a poor grind fundamentally affects extraction, so nothing else in the setup can compensate for it. One might start with a ₹4,000 grinder, only to realise within a couple of months that it no longer quite holds up, and by the time they move to a ₹10,000 one, they have already spent far more than it would have cost to start at the right point. The kettle can wait, and the scale can be a basic kitchen one, but the grinder is the one thing you cannot get wrong at the start.

“If your grind isn’t good, your extraction won’t be good,” he says, “and then you will never really know what the coffee was supposed to taste like.”

That idea showed up most clearly in his early espressos, which were, by his own admission, absolutely horrible. A small adjustment would improve the cup just enough for him to think he had figured it out, only for the next change to reveal how much more there was still to understand, a cycle that kept repeating until he realised this was simply how learning in coffee actually works.

“Make mistakes,” he says. “Just make sure they’re new ones every time.”

Building an Apartment Café

As coffee became a larger part of his life, it also began to shape how he spent time with other people. Friends and acquaintances started visiting his apartment out of curiosity, often wanting to understand what specialty coffee actually was. Some wanted to try a pourover for the first time, others were simply curious about what made it feel so different from instant coffee.

Prashant began brewing for them casually, without any structure or expectation. What started as occasional visits gradually became a steady rhythm until he began referring to the space as his “apartment café”.

People would sit around talking while he adjusted grinders, pulled shots, or walked them through the differences between coffees. Some compared his cortados to café versions they had tried elsewhere, others drifted into conversations about brewing methods and equipment, and often the coffee simply sat there while the evening carried on around it.

“People go to cafés for the ambience, the experience, the baristas,” he says.

At home, none of that structure existed. There was no separation between the person making the coffee and the people drinking it; there was no need to perform the process in any particular way. Questions came more freely, experiments happened without much thought, and coffee became something people could enter without needing prior understanding or confidence.

What stayed with him was not any single brew or method, but the ease with which coffee created space for people to linger, talk more, and let the evening unfold without much direction.

Coffee Communities and Learning Publicly

Although Prashant learned coffee largely on his own, the community became an important part of how he kept refining it. One of the earliest moments that stayed with him was entering a latte art championship despite having far less experience than most of the professional baristas around him. He went in expecting the space to feel competitive and intimidating, but instead found people who were willing to talk through techniques, point out mistakes, and share advice without hesitation.

That openness stayed with him, and over time, he found himself stepping into those same community spaces in Hyderabad, where home brewers, beginners, and enthusiasts gather informally to exchange brewing tips, discuss equipment, recommend cafés, and troubleshoot each other’s experiments in real time. There is no fixed structure to it, only a shared willingness to keep learning in public.

For him, that matters because specialty coffee often feels more distant than it needs to, especially for people just beginning to explore it from the outside. At the same time, he acknowledges that the rise of home brewing has not been universally welcomed within parts of the café industry. Still, he does not see it as a competition between two worlds. A café and a home setup, he believes, sit in entirely different spaces.

“There’s no comparison,” he says. “Both are completely different experiences.”

One is built around atmosphere, service, and the experience of being in a space designed for coffee. The other is slower and more personal, shaped by curiosity, repetition, and the freedom to spend an entire Sunday adjusting recipes without any urgency.

What he does question more critically are cafés that position themselves as specialty coffee spaces without really engaging with their breadth or discipline. For him, the menu often says more than the branding ever does.

“When I see pourovers, aeropress, cortados, piccolos on the menu, then I know they actually care about specialty coffee,” he says.

If a café limits itself to the usual cappuccinos and lattes while still calling itself a specialty, he finds it harder to take that claim seriously.

To Each Their Own Brew

One of the most noticeable shifts in Prashant’s thinking over the years has been his changing relationship with coffee mixology. He was initially dismissive of mixing coffee with syrups, fruit, or other unconventional ingredients, seeing it as a distraction from what coffee was supposed to be. That certainty did not last once experimentation entered his routine at home.

What followed was a gradual widening of curiosity. Coconut water espresso, cloud foam drinks, clarified coffee, Yakult-based experiments, orange-espresso combinations, and watermelon coffee all began appearing in his kitchen, not as planned recipes but as questions he wanted to test in liquid form, which he shares on Instagram with a wider community of coffee enthusiasts.

Some combinations worked immediately; others collapsed almost as soon as they were tried, but over time, he found himself less interested in judging outcomes and more in understanding why they behaved as they did.

The watermelon experiment itself surprised him. Using a light roast and a Japanese brewing method, he combined coffee with cold-pressed watermelon juice and ended up with a cup he describes as unexpectedly balanced, almost cleaner than he had anticipated. When he shared it on Instagram, the response was immediate curiosity, as if the combination had opened a possibility rather than a recipe.

What draws him to mixology now is less about experimentation for novelty and more about how it sparks curiosity among people who would not normally drink coffee at all. For many non-coffee drinkers, fruit-forward or mixology combinations feel more inviting, often becoming the first point of interest that makes them want to try coffee.

“It helps people slowly get into coffee,” he says.

He also recalls a moment in Thailand when he tried combining orange, Coke, and espresso, a combination he had assumed would never work until he actually tasted it.

“In my wildest dreams, I never thought these three things could go together.”

Now, he is less interested in where coffee should or should not go. Coffee, to him, no longer sits inside fixed boundaries but behaves more like something that changes depending on what you bring to it.

“Coffee is a very sensitive fruit,” he says. “It adapts to anything around it.”

Coffee as a Social Space

Although Prashant currently works outside the traditional coffee supply chain, he often finds himself thinking about what a café of his own might look like one day. Not a large commercial setup, but a smaller, more intimate space shaped around interaction rather than transaction, where people do not remain anchored to their own tables, and conversation moves as freely as the coffee being served. A space, as he puts it, where coffee is less something ordered and finished, and more the reason people end up staying longer than they planned.

“I want people to connect,” he says.

As the conversation moves towards the wider world of coffee, his focus shifts from personal brewing to a broader question of where Indian coffee stands in global conversations. He is optimistic about the growth of specialty coffee in India, but feels it still lacks the same visibility or instinctive recognition that origins like Ethiopia, Colombia, Kenya, or even Vietnam have come to hold internationally.

He describes conversations with people across the United States, France, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines, where coffees from those origins are often mentioned with familiarity and enthusiasm, while Indian coffee rarely enters the discussion in the same immediate way. For him, that absence still feels like something unfinished.

“I would want people to say that the Arabica bean from India, from Araku or Riverdale, was amazing.”

For now, his relationship with coffee still returns to smaller, quieter routines: experimenting with recipes late into the night, adjusting espresso shots until they feel right, sharing his coffee experiments with a wider community on Instagram, and continuing to invite people into his apartment for cups that many of them are tasting for the first time. It is a rhythm that has remained unchanged in essence, still rooted in the same curiosity that began with a single attempt to recreate a cup he once drank in Vietnam, and which has since kept pulling him back into the process, cup after cup.