George Howell at 81: Fifty Years of Chasing the Perfect Cup

In 1975, George Howell opened a small café in Harvard Square called the Coffee Connection. He brewed French press coffee, roasted beans lighter than anyone in the Northeast dared to, and charged what most people at the time considered a ridiculous price for a cup. Fifty years later, at 81, he’s still doing essentially the same thing — just with five cafés, a dedicated roastery in Acton, Massachusetts, and considerably less patience for anyone who over-roasts their beans.

“I see a gorgeous sunset, I’ve got to drag you in to take a look at it,” Howell told WBUR this week, marking his half-century in coffee. “That’s what drives me.”

From Harvard Square to Starbucks

The Coffee Connection grew to 24 locations across the Northeast, each one serving as a quiet argument that coffee could be something more than the burnt, bitter stuff Americans had been drinking for decades. Howell championed light roasts at a time when dark roast was synonymous with quality in most people’s minds. His approach was heretical — and eventually proven right.

The chain also birthed the Frappuccino. That blended iced coffee drink, made on a soft-serve machine, became a signature at Coffee Connection locations throughout the late 1980s and early ’90s. When Starbucks acquired the chain in 1994 for over $20 million, the Frappuccino trademark came with it. Starbucks turned it into a billion-dollar product line. Howell turned his attention elsewhere.

Creating the Cup of Excellence

What Howell did next arguably mattered more than anything he’d built before. Free from running a chain, he helped create the Cup of Excellence — an international coffee competition and auction system that let individual farms sell their best lots directly to the highest bidder. Before the Cup of Excellence, most specialty coffee was still bought through commodity channels where individual farms rarely got recognized, let alone rewarded, for exceptional quality.

The competition changed that. Winning farms could suddenly command prices many times higher than commodity rates, and the transparency of the auction format meant buyers knew exactly what they were getting and where it came from. The program helped establish the direct trade relationships that define modern specialty coffee sourcing — the idea that a roaster should know the specific farm, the specific lot, the specific processing method behind every bag they sell.

George Howell Coffee

In 2004, Howell opened a roastery in Acton, about 25 miles northwest of Boston. The first George Howell Coffee café followed in 2012. Today, the company operates five locations around Boston, with his daughter Jennifer serving as vice president.

The roasting philosophy hasn’t changed from those Harvard Square days. Howell still insists on light roasts that preserve a coffee’s origin character rather than burying it under caramelization and char. “Brown is the color of coffee, and all coffees have a basic flavor, which is coffee itself. It’s an irreducible flavor,” he explained. The goal is to highlight everything beyond that baseline — the floral notes, the fruit, the terroir that makes a Kenyan peaberry taste nothing like a Colombian Castillo.

Speed matters at the roaster, too. Beans need to cool “as quickly as possible. Otherwise, what happens is the coffee keeps cooking,” Howell noted. It sounds simple, but the precision involved separates his approach from most commercial operations.

George Howell Coffee was also among the first roasters in the world to freeze green coffee for preservation — a practice that’s since gained wider adoption across the specialty industry. Lancaster’s Passenger Coffee, which now freezes its entire green inventory, has cited Howell as a pioneer of the concept.

The Color-Coded Bag

At 81, Howell is still iterating. His latest project is a redesigned bag system that uses color gradients to communicate tasting notes visually. An orange gradient signals butterscotch. Vivid pink-red means cherry. Vibrant indigo represents blueberry. The idea is that customers can orient themselves by color before they read a single word of the tasting description.

It’s a small thing, maybe. But it reflects how Howell thinks about coffee — always looking for ways to close the gap between what he tastes and what his customers experience.

Why This Matters

The specialty coffee industry owes a significant debt to a handful of people who decided, decades before the rest of the market caught up, that coffee deserved the same attention to sourcing, processing, and preparation that wine had been getting for centuries. George Howell is near the top of that list. The Coffee Connection proved the market existed. The Cup of Excellence built the infrastructure for farm-level recognition. George Howell Coffee continues to demonstrate what meticulous sourcing and light roasting can achieve.

Industry observer Matt Roberts put it well: “The person who criticizes George Howell the most in the industry is George Howell. He just never settles for perfection.”

Howell, for his part, isn’t thinking about legacy. Asked about his impact after 50 years, his response was characteristically understated: “I hope it sticks.”