It was roasting day at George Howell Coffee in Acton. A shiny industrial roasting machine thrummed loudly, while an employee monitored its vital signs on a pair of computer screens nearby. Howell, sporting his trademark blue vest, peered into the machine, where freshly roasted beans spun in slow circles.
The beans, he explained, came out of the roaster at well over 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The cooling tray was “sucking in the air from the environment through the beans, to cool that coffee as quickly as possible,” Howell said. “Otherwise, what happens is the coffee keeps cooking.”
For Howell, there is nothing worse than an overcooked coffee bean. As the founder of the legendary coffee chain The Coffee Connection, he was an early embracer of light roast coffee — the fragrant, delicate counterpoint to the dark roasts that once dominated the American market.
The Coffee Connection was an influential player in the Northeast coffee scene in the 1970s and ‘80s, perhaps best known for an iced coffee drink made in a soft serve machine called the Frappuccino. Howell sold his company, and the Frappuccino trademark, to Starbucks in 1994. But he remained at the forefront of coffee culture, helping usher in what is now known as coffee’s “third wave,” with its emphasis on single origin beans and direct trade with farms. Howell is sometimes called the godfather of specialty coffee.
Nowadays, light roast is de rigueur among specialty coffee roasters. Howell has simply turned his sights on new innovations. His latest idea is a coffee bag design that signals tasting notes through color: an orange gradient evoking butterscotch, vivid pink-red for cherry, vibrant indigo for blueberry. Standing in the warehouse’s packaging center, he showed me a bag with three slender stripes of yellow, pink and orange — the tasting notes — above a big brown square.
“ Brown is the color of coffee, and all coffees have a basic flavor, which is coffee itself,” he explained. “It’s an irreducible flavor.”
Howell led me to a brewing station at the other end of the warehouse. Jennifer Howell — his daughter and the company’s vice president — was setting up a row of shot glasses of coffee for me to taste. These included beans from Ethiopia, Costa Rica, Brazil, Rwanda and Kenya, as well as a natural coffee from Yemen that retails for $80 a bag.
Jennifer handed me an empty glass and a spoon, and offered me the use of a spittoon in case I started to feel overcaffeinated.
“So pour some in, and then you can sip it,” she said, demonstrating how to ladle a spoonful of coffee out of the sample glass and into my own vessel. I delicately slurped the coffee, which was aromatic and pleasantly acidic.
“Delicious, right?” Jennifer said, before directing me to try the next coffee, which she promised would not be delicious. “Just prepare yourself,” she warned. “It’s pretty bad.”
I took a sip and couldn’t help but pull a face. The coffee tasted bitter and stale. “We call that ‘age,’” Jennifer said. “That’s wood, cedar, paper bag.”
The reason for this, she explained, was because the beans had sat around in the warehouse for a year before being roasted. The point of the exercise was to show how deeply the flavor degraded when subjected to this process. Howell explained that his company freezes their beans in order to avoid this apparently widespread crime.
“We’re the first roasters in the world to freeze green coffee,” he said proudly.
What were the other specialty shops doing to keep their beans fresh, if not freezing them, I wondered. “They very often are selling you aged coffee,” Howell responded with an incredulous chuckle.
At 81, Howell prides himself on remaining vigilant in his pursuit of the best beans, the best roast, the best brew. This week, he marked 50 years in the coffee business with a series of events at his cafes. On Saturday, he will appear at Lovestruck Books in Harvard Square for a talk and tasting.
Sitting in the company’s offices, Howell remembered the first time his father served him coffee, when he was a boy of six or seven.
“He takes a spoon, and pours sugared sweetened cream on top so that it lands in the spoon first and then floats,” he recalled, smiling at the memory. “And I fell in love with that. That was delicious. But later I tried the black coffee alone and I hated it, because it was so bitter.”
That aversion to bitterness is how Howell discovered light roast beans in the pioneering coffee scene of San Francisco, where he and his wife lived in the 1960s and early ‘70s. When they moved to Boston, two children already in tow, Howell was appalled at how bad the coffee was in his adoptive city. An art aficionado, he dreamed of opening a gallery to showcase his particular passion, Wixárikan yarn art. He also saw an opportunity in the city’s lackluster coffee culture.
The Coffee Connection opened in Harvard Square in 1975. Along with the displayed artwork, the cafe offered French press coffee and a light roast prepared in the store’s Burlington roastery. Not that Howell had any clue how to roast coffee at first. He recalled “several fires” in those early days, as well as at least one ruined roasting machine.
“I remember we didn’t turn off the gas when I opened the door to the beans coming pouring out into the cooling tray. And this flash of fire came straight for me,” he said.
The Coffee Connection was a runaway success. Howell opened a total of 24 shops throughout the Northeast. In his telling, the chain’s expansion, plus the introduction of private equity, meant that he had to focus more on business than coffee, his true passion. Plus, his six kids would soon be off to college. So when Starbucks offered him over $20 million for the business, he took it.
Howell’s next big idea was an international coffee competition. The farms that won would be able to auction their coffee for a premium, and roasters would discover new, high-quality beans. The contest, called the Cup of Excellence, helped usher in the modern era of specialty coffee, with its focus on sourcing beans directly from single farms.
“People will credit him with serving the first Frappuccinos, but I think he’s way more proud of establishing the Cup of Excellence,” said Matt Roberts, the founder of the Gloucester coffee company Cometeer.
He described Howell as a singular figure in the coffee world.
“The person who criticizes George Howell the most in the industry is George Howell. He just never settles for perfection,” Roberts said. It was common, he added, for people who know Howell to say, “Well, George has been looking for that perfect bean for 35, 45, 50 years now.”
It’s easy to see why. After opening the Acton roastery in 2004, Howell opened up his first George Howell Coffee cafe in 2012 and has since expanded to four more locations around Boston. This is despite a more competitive coffee industry and a far more costly business environment in almost every sense. In a strange twist, Howell is now competing with a flourishing local coffee scene that has embraced many of the ideas he once championed. This fact does not seem to daunt him. He expects to retire soon – but not just yet.
When I asked Howell how it felt to have had such an impact, he paused. “I hope it sticks,” he said finally.
Howell worries that climate change will wipe out the best varieties of coffee. He worries that young roasters will move away from small farms and meticulous roasts, lured by the false promise of new tech and industrial methods. But when I asked what drove him, he mentioned neither fear of change nor a sense of needing to shore up his legacy.
“I see a gorgeous sunset, I’ve got to drag you in to take a look at it,” Howell said. “That’s what drives me.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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