about

Hi, I’m Hao-yung Weng.

I got into coffee in college, where I ran the student coffee club at National Taiwan University. We took our curiosity seriously: reading papers, hosting cupping sessions, and carefully measuring our brews. I still cherish those days, and the friends I made there.

Some of what I’ve picked up over the years, not all of it figured out, has found its way into this blog. The name, whycoffee.blog, is a play on my initials WHY and a question I keep coming back to. Why coffee? The comfort of a morning routine? The taste of a particular place? The people and stories behind each cup? Or geeking out with someone who cares just as much?

When hosting events, I often talk about the many hands coffee passes through: the people who grow, harvest, and process it, the people who cup, buy, and roast it, and finally those who brew it and those who drink it. Most of them will never meet, but for a moment, their lives connect in a cup. That’s when I like to tell my audience: “Notice how coffee connects us, you and me, right here.”

And now, through these words, coffee connects us, too.