Recipe
Bạc xỉu
Vietnamese milk coffee, milk-forward
Roughly: bak SYOO
Mostly milk, a little coffee. A southern morning drink for people who want the café more than the caffeine.
How to make bạc xỉu
IngredientsFor 1 glass
- Dark-roast Vietnamese robusta, medium-coarse12 gabout 2 tbsp
Deliberately a small dose. This is the point of the drink.
- Water, just off the boil60 ml4 tbsp
- Sweetened condensed milk40 ml2½ tbsp
- Fresh or evaporated milk, warm80 ml⅓ cup
Evaporated is closer to how the southern cafés built it, and it holds up better against ice.
- Icea full glass
Leave it out for bạc xỉu nóng, the hot version, which is the older form.
Equipment
- A phin, 120 ml
- A tall glass
- A long spoon
Method
- 1
Condensed milk and fresh milk together
Stir the condensed milk and the warm fresh milk together in the glass until completely combined. Doing this first, before any coffee, is what gives bạc xỉu its even pale colour.
Look for: A uniform creamy off-white with no streaks.
- 2
Brew a small phin
Twelve grams, bloom with 12 ml, then the remaining water. A smaller dose drips faster, so expect three to four minutes rather than five.
Look for: About 45–50 ml of dark coffee.
- 3
Pour the coffee over the back of a spoon
If you want the layered look cafés serve, pour slowly over the back of a spoon held just above the milk. It will float as a darker cap for a minute or two.
Look for: A distinct dark layer sitting on pale milk.
- 4
Ice, then stir
Add ice and stir. The finished drink should be the colour of milky tea, noticeably paler than cà phê sữa đá.
Look for: Pale caramel, almost beige.
If it goes wrong
| What happened | Why | What to change |
|---|---|---|
| It tastes like coffee, not like bạc xỉu. | Too much coffee for the milk. | The ratio is roughly 1 part coffee to 2½ parts milk. Drop to 10 g of coffee. |
| It is cloyingly sweet. | Condensed milk plus sweetened fresh milk. | Use unsweetened fresh or evaporated milk, and cut the condensed milk to 30 ml. |
| There is a faint cooked, tinned taste under the sweetness. | Condensed milk let down with hot water and not enough coffee over it. Two of the Vietnamese accounts of the drink describe this as the reason coffee went in at all. | Keep the coffee at a full 12 g rather than dropping lower, and brew it properly dark. A thin brew will not cover it. |
| The milk and the coffee will not combine, and the bottom stays white. | The condensed milk was stirred into cold milk, or not stirred at all before the coffee went on. | Warm the fresh milk first and stir the two milks to an even colour before anything else. Cold condensed milk is close to solid. |
| It is pale but watery rather than creamy. | Carton milk, or ice added before stirring. | Use whole or evaporated milk, and stir the glass to an even colour before the ice goes in. |
The short version
Stir condensed milk and warm fresh milk together in the glass. Brew a small 12 g phin over the top. Add ice, stir, drink.
What bạc xỉu is
Bạc xỉu (Vietnamese milk coffee, built milk-first) takes the southern coffee drink and inverts it. Sweetened condensed milk goes in the glass, and so does a second milk, fresh or evaporated. A small phin of dark robusta goes over the top. Twelve grams of coffee against 120 ml of milk, where a cà phê sữa đá runs 20 g of coffee against 30 ml of condensed milk and nothing else.
The result is closer to a cold, sweet, coffee-flavoured milk than to coffee, and it finishes the colour of milky tea. In Saigon it is what a great many people drink at eight in the morning.
It is not a watered-down cà phê sữa đá. The second milk changes the texture as much as the small dose changes the strength.
What the name means
The name is Cantonese, from the language of the Chinese trading quarter of Saigon and Chợ Lớn. Four published accounts give bạc xỉu as a clipped form of a longer phrase, written in Vietnamese as bạc tẩy xỉu phé:
| Word | Gloss given |
|---|---|
| bạc | white |
| tẩy | the cup |
| xỉu | a little |
| phé | coffee |
A cup of white milk with a little coffee in it. That is the drink, and the name is the recipe, the same way cà phê sữa đá is coffee, milk and ice in order.
The accounts do not agree on the spelling of the phrase, though. Thanh Niên writes bạc tẩy xỉu phé, VietNamNet bạc tảy xíu phé, Người Lao Động bạc tẩy sỉu phé. None of the four gives the Cantonese in Chinese characters either, so what is well attested is the gloss rather than the etymology. A Vietnamese reader will also see pạc xỉu and bạc sỉu, which Thanh Niên reports as what Chinese customers said at the counter.
Why the coffee is the smaller half
The usual explanation of a milk coffee is that the milk softens the coffee. Two of the Vietnamese accounts put it the other way round.
Fresh milk was scarce and expensive in mid-century Saigon. What ordinary shops had was sweetened condensed milk, which keeps without refrigeration. Let down with boiling water it makes a drinkable hot milk, but, as VietNamNet and Tuổi Trẻ both describe it, one with a faint cooked, tinned note underneath. A little coffee covered that note.
On that account the coffee in a bạc xỉu is a corrective rather than the point of the glass, which is why the dose is small and why the drink makes no sense brewed weak. Twelve grams of properly dark robusta does the job. A thin brew leaves the tinned taste showing through, and that is the most common thing wrong with a homemade one.
Bạc xỉu and cà phê sữa đá
The two drinks get confused constantly, and the Vietnamese sources are blunt that they are different things.
| Bạc xỉu | Cà phê sữa đá | |
|---|---|---|
| Coffee | 12 g | 20 g |
| Condensed milk | 40 ml | 30 ml |
| Second milk | 80 ml fresh or evaporated | none |
| Milk to coffee | about 2½ : 1 | about 1 : 2½ |
| Finished colour | pale caramel | dark toffee |
| Caffeine, estimated | 190–290 mg | 320–490 mg |
| Where you order it | southern, Saigon especially | everywhere |
The second milk is the part people miss. Cà phê sữa đá uses condensed milk alone; bạc xỉu uses condensed milk and fresh or evaporated milk, which is what makes it creamy rather than merely sweet. Drop the fresh milk and add water and you have a weak cà phê sữa đá, which is a different and worse drink.
Both figures in the last two rows are estimates rather than measurements. The caffeine arithmetic for each dose is set out on the caffeine page, and the reason bạc xỉu lands around 280 calories against a sữa đá’s 120, despite holding less coffee, is worked through drink by drink on the calories page.
Nóng or đá
Both, now. The naming works the way it does across the whole southern menu: bạc xỉu nóng is hot, bạc xỉu đá is iced.
The older form appears to be the hot one. The accounts of the drink’s origins describe condensed milk let down with boiling water, and two of them are openly unimpressed by the iced version, on the grounds that in a glass this pale only heat brings the coffee forward at all. A 2024 Tuổi Trẻ piece treats the choice as simple preference. Iced is what most cafés sell and what the photograph at the top of this page shows.
If you have only had it iced, the hot version is the one those accounts are describing, and on their reasoning it is the more coffee-forward drink for the same ingredients.
Where it came from
The drink is agreed to have come from the Chinese-Vietnamese community of Saigon, and it is still much more common in the south than the north. Past that, the published accounts diverge by about fifty years.
The MICHELIN Guide places it in Saigon’s Chinatown in the early 20th century. VietNamNet and Tuổi Trẻ both put it in the 1950s and 60s, among the cheap Chinese-run tiệm nước that sold coffee, tea and breakfast. None of the four accounts read for this page cites a document, and two of them present the origin story as legend or as personal recollection. The century is contested.
The story they do share is that the drink was made for the people at the table who were not drinking coffee: children brought along by their fathers, and women who found black coffee too bitter. The MICHELIN Guide introduces it with “legend has it”, and the Vietnamese pieces attribute it to what Saigonese say rather than to a record.
The Thanh Niên account adds one detail that would matter if it holds up. In the Chợ Lớn shops of the 1970s, it says, there was no phin to be found: coffee was brewed through a cloth filter and kept hot in a clay pot. If that is right, bạc xỉu in its own neighbourhood is older than the phin it is now made with.
How to order one
The old tiệm nước had a vocabulary of its own, recorded in a 2008 Người Lao Động piece: xây chừng for a small black coffee, tài chừng for a large one, xây nại for coffee with milk, and xây bạc sỉu for this one. Almost none of that survives in a café today.
What works now is the plain name. Ask for bạc xỉu in the south and you will get it; add nóng or đá for hot or iced. In Hanoi the word is less current, and the northern habit of saying nâu for milk coffee is covered on our page about the drink names.
Substitutions
| Instead of | Use | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| Fresh milk | Evaporated milk | Closer to how it is often made in Vietnam. It is richer and holds up better against ice. |
| Dairy | Oat milk plus oat condensed milk | Works well. Oat's natural sweetness means you can cut the condensed milk further. |
| A phin | A single espresso, or 50 ml from a Moka pot | Fine here. A small dose is wanted, so this is the one Vietnamese coffee drink a filter machine can almost manage. |
| Ice | Nothing, served hot | Bạc xỉu nóng, and the form the published accounts describe first. The coffee reads more clearly hot, which is the whole argument for it. |
Questions people ask
- What is bạc xỉu?
- A Vietnamese coffee drink built the other way round from the usual one: sweetened condensed milk and fresh or evaporated milk in the glass first, then a small phin of dark robusta poured over the top. It finishes the colour of milky tea and tastes closer to cold sweet coffee-flavoured milk than to coffee. It is a southern drink, strongly associated with Saigon.
- What does bạc xỉu mean in English?
- Four published accounts give it as a clipped form of a Cantonese phrase written in Vietnamese as bạc tẩy xỉu phé, in which bạc is white, tẩy is the cup, xỉu is a little and phé is coffee. Read together it describes a cup of white milk with a little coffee in it. The spelling of the phrase varies between the accounts and none of them gives the Cantonese in Chinese characters.
- What is the difference between bạc xỉu and cà phê sữa đá?
- Proportion, and a second milk. Cà phê sữa đá is 20 g of coffee with about 30 ml of condensed milk added; bạc xỉu is 40 ml of condensed milk and 80 ml of fresh or evaporated milk with only 12 g of coffee over it. Bạc xỉu finishes pale caramel and holds an estimated 190–290 mg of caffeine against 320–490 mg.
- Is bạc xỉu strong?
- It is the mildest of the everyday Vietnamese coffees. The dose is about 12 g against the 20 g a cà phê sữa đá uses, so the estimate for the glass is 190–290 mg of caffeine. That is still above the 113–247 mg the FDA gives for a 12 fl oz cup of regular brewed coffee, because a phin brews so much more concentrated than a filter.
- Is bạc xỉu served hot or iced?
- Both. The accounts that describe the drink's origins describe it hot, made with condensed milk let down with boiling water, and two of them treat the iced version as a departure. A 2024 Tuổi Trẻ piece says hot or iced is simply a matter of preference now. Hot is bạc xỉu nóng; iced is bạc xỉu đá.
- How many calories are in a bạc xỉu?
- ESTIMATE: about 280, with roughly 36 g of total sugars, for the 40 ml of condensed milk and 80 ml of evaporated milk this page starts from. That makes it the heaviest of the everyday milk coffees, because it carries more than twice the milk of a cà phê sữa đá. The drink-by-drink arithmetic is on our calories page.
- Is bạc xỉu the same as a latte?
- Similar in spirit, different in construction. A latte is espresso and steamed milk; bạc xỉu is phin coffee with condensed milk and unsteamed fresh milk, and it is sweet by default.
Sources
Figures on this page come from the following. Where a claim is an estimate or a common description rather than a measurement, the text says so.
- Bạc sỉu, di sản Sài Gòn xưaThanh Niên · 2016-02-03 · accessed 2026-10-17The name given as a clipped form of bạc tẩy xỉu phé, glossed in the article as hot milk with a little coffee added; the variants pạc xỉu and phé nại used by Chinese customers; and the account that the tea-and-coffee shops of Chợ Lớn in the 1970s used no phin, brewing through a cloth filter into a clay pot instead. The article is a personal recollection, which is why the page attributes rather than asserts it.
- Bạc xỉu: Câu chuyện sữa - cà phê của người Sài GònVietNamNet · 2016-05-05 · accessed 2026-10-17The word-by-word gloss of bạc tảy xíu phé as white, cup, a little and coffee; Cantonese as the language of the Saigon and Chợ Lớn trading quarter; the Chinese tiệm nước dated to the 1950s and 60s; and the explanation that sweetened condensed milk let down with hot water tasted slightly off, so a little coffee was added to cover it.
- Bạc xỉu - Nhấm nháp chút “hơi thở của thời gian” giữa lòng Sài GònTuổi Trẻ · 2024-01-18 · accessed 2026-10-17The same four glosses of the Cantonese phrase; the drink dated to the 1950s and 60s on accounts the article does not name; condensed milk standing in for fresh milk because fresh milk was expensive; the build as condensed milk mixed with fresh milk and a little coffee over the top; and the statement that hot or iced is a matter of preference.
- Trong tiệm nước người HoaNgười Lao Động, via Tuổi Trẻ Online · 2008-05-18 · accessed 2026-10-17The ordering vocabulary of the Chinese-run tiệm nước: xây chừng for a small black coffee, tài chừng for a large one, xây nại for coffee with milk, and xây bạc sỉu, which the article also gives as bạc tẩy sỉu phé and glosses as milk with boiling water and a little coffee added.
- A Guide to Vietnamese CoffeeMICHELIN Guide · 2024-03-30 · accessed 2026-10-17The drink attributed to Chinese residents of Saigon's Chinatown in the early 20th century, which is the dating that conflicts with the Vietnamese accounts; and the story, which the article itself introduces as legend, that the coffee-to-milk ratio was adjusted for women and children who found black coffee too bitter.
- Milk, canned, condensed, sweetened (FDC ID 171275)USDA FoodData Central, SR Legacy · 2019-04 · accessed 2026-10-17Sweetened condensed milk at 321 kcal and 54.4 g of total sugars per 100 g, with 38.2 g per US fluid ounce. That density is what turns the 40 ml in this recipe into about 52 g, and it is the larger half of the calorie and sugar figures quoted here.
- Milk, canned, evaporated, with added vitamin D and without added vitamin A (FDC ID 171276)USDA FoodData Central, SR Legacy · 2019-04 · accessed 2026-10-17Evaporated milk at 134 kcal and 10.0 g of total sugars per 100 g, with 31.5 g per US fluid ounce, which is the second milk in the build and the rest of the calorie figure.
- Spilling the Beans: How Much Caffeine is Too Much?US Food and Drug Administration · 2024-08 · accessed 2026-10-17113–247 mg of caffeine in a 12 fl oz serving of regular brewed non-specialty coffee, which is the comparison this page uses for the 12 g dose.
