The GDR and Vietnam: From Fake Coffee to Coffee Empire

Automated excerpt

East German agrarian engineer, Hellmut Naderer, with the direktor of the coffee collective Viet Duc, mid 1980s. Coffee wasn’t always easy to get hold of. Then the coffee crisis of 1977 hit the world. Famously, one solution was to offer the population terrible ersatz coffee made from 51 per cent coffee, 34 per cent rye-barley mix, 5 per cent chicory, 5 per cent sugar beet fibre and 5 per cent ground spelt. The guy who’s currently growing coffee in Vietnam said that this hasn’t changed.

Selected automatically from source text; not independently written or fact-checked. Read the original for full context.