Hubert Young: Keeping the age-old coffee culture perfectly brewed

The young ones especially the Gen Zs are people in a hurry.

- IRIS GONZALES

They can type on their phones even faster than Al, they have reinvented the English language with their shortened codes and abbreviations and they like their lives dizzyingly fast.

They might get bored with degustation because with a thousand and one delivery apps, they like their food in an instant and their eating, mindless.

They also like their coffee to-go, in stark contrast to older generations who can spend hours on end enjoying that perfect cup of coffee almost like a hypnotic ritual or a meditative exercise.

This is the reason why there are now small coffee kiosks and pop-up coffee shops in nearly every nook and cranny of Metro Manila or beyond.

Hubert Young, the boomer coffee tycoon who brought the famed UCC Coffee in the Philippines all the way from Kobe, Japan, doesn't see this as a problem.

Instead, he continues his mission of, keeping the fine art of coffee drinking in the Philippines alive, rich and beautiful." A family of entrepreneurs The coffee tycoon after all knows coffee and the food business like the back of his hand.

He comes from a family of food entrepreneurs, hailing from the Young clan of Cebu who is behind the Philippine feed and flour industry pillar General Milling Corp., one of the biggest integrated food companies in the country today.

The family patriarch George Youngsometimes mistaken for George Yang of McDonald's Philippines fame-established General Milling in 1961.

Hubert used to run the group's coffee manufacturing facility back in the 80s. Their company had the franchise of San Franciscobased Hills Bros. Coffee.

It was in San Francisco where Hubert stayed for several years and learned the ins and outs of the coffee manufacturing business.

During the EDSA Revolution, he went back to the United States and stayed there for a while.