The Story
George Howell, born in 1945, is popularly referred to as the grandfather of the specialty coffee movement and was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Specialty Coffee Association of America in 1996.
In 1975, Howell founded Coffee Connection, a coffee shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts which pioneered third wave coffee and expanded to 23 locations before being acquired by Starbucks for $23 million in 1994.
With the acquisition, Starbucks acquired the rights to use the name Frappuccino for the popular blended iced coffee drink.
After selling The Coffee Connection to Starbucks, George was free to resume his coffee education in new ways, traveling to coffee-producing countries offering his services as a quality consultant and beginning in 1997, working for the United Nations and the International Coffee Organization creating models of economic sustainability for coffee farmers.
This project led to his conceiving and co-founding the Cup of Excellence in 1999, a program designed to help break the commodity/price cycle in the specialty-coffee industry and bring acclaim to passionate farmers doing outstanding work in coffee producing countries.
Wanting to be back in his roots in coffee, George opened George Howell Coffee in 2004.
The roastery opened in 2004 in Acton, Massachusetts, just 45 minutes from downtown Boston.
Starting as a wholesale coffee business and growing to three retail locations by 2016, George Howell Coffee is continuously expanding and as of 2026 it is a mini-chain with five locations in the Boston area.
Sourcing & Relationships
George Howell Coffee was created in early 2004 to forge a new kind of partnership with coffee growers – one which recognizes their fundamental role and identity in the production of high quality coffees, believing that one should not blend truly fine coffees, just like one does not blend fine wines, because they are already complete statements.
The company’s coffee sourcing is based primarily on relationships they build with coffee farms over many years of visiting and buying coffee from them, with The Cup of Excellence providing an essential tool in discovering quality farms through coffee auctions in origin countries.
The company pays a fair price – defined by the producer as well as the buyer – one based on a sliding quality scale created to incentivize the highest possible standards, paying well above Fair Trade prices for all their coffees and top prices for green coffees, far exceeding Fair Trade pricing.
In an effort to nurture these relationships, George and his daughter Jenny travel to many of the farms they buy from as well as other coffee producing areas to develop and maintain real and lasting relationships, working directly with farms that share their interest in social responsibility and environmental sustainability.
George Howell Coffee maintains close partnerships with high-quality producers from across Africa, Central and South America in addition to working with longstanding export partners, such as Kenya’s C Dorman Ltd.
They extend their knowledge through participation in organizations such as Cup of Excellence, which provides a critical vehicle for aspiring farmers to find funding, technical aid, and above all, international recognition in countries where who you know can be the sole determinant of your fate.
Roasting Philosophy
As the founder of the legendary coffee chain The Coffee Connection, Howell was an early embracer of light roast coffee — the fragrant, delicate counterpoint to the dark roasts that once dominated the American market.
Most American “specialty” coffees are roasted much darker than European coffee, covering or driving off the finest aromas, but Howell roasts moderately.
George Howell Coffees is a microroaster focusing on elite single-origin coffees and his company was a pioneer in the revival of medium roast styles designed to foreground the character of the green coffee.
All their coffee is craft-roasted daily to order in small batches, which guarantees freshness and enables them to maintain strict quality control throughout the entire roasting process, with quality control team approval required before packaging immediately in airtight, one-way valve bags to preserve freshness.
A major innovation at George Howell Coffee is that all green coffee is frozen from day one upon arrival in Boston, a practice Howell began in 2004, maintaining freshness over a period of two to three years minimum.
The company pioneered practices including being the first roasters to package green coffee in vacuum bags, paving the way for long term storage of raw coffee and allowing great vintages to outlast their seasonality, and financing and introducing the coffee world’s first coffee refractometer and software system, Extract MoJo.
Their light roasts are delicately roasted to highlight the terroir from their native countries, creating lively and multi-dimensional coffees packed with bright yet smooth acidity, florals, fruit that pops, and ever-morphing tasting notes that last from hot to cool.
What to Try
Their Terroir® Coffee line of single-estate and exceptional regional coffees represents the next step in their unfolding odyssey as they press to extend the limits of quality coffee standards, specializing in single estate coffees and pioneering in raising quality coffee standards to much higher levels.
The signature Terroir Coffee, a term frequently used in discussions of fine wines, reflects the company’s reverence for the origin and flavor subtleties of the coffee.
Their Kenyan coffees are consistently noted as always quite special.
The Alchemy Espresso blend is carefully designed to be a classic, darker-style espresso that is especially rich and stands up perfectly to milk, with three coffees forming the basis: a Brazilian naturally processed coffee offering a velvety body with soft fruit notes, a Costa Rican coffee adding a nougat and milk chocolate-like sweetness, and small-farms Guatemalan coffee contributing a rich bittersweet chocolate-and-nuts complexity.
They offer Limited Roasts: rare and exceptional lots that are roasted in small batches and change weekly, available in small quantities each week, on sale every Friday and roasted the following Monday.
Recent tastings have included beans from Ethiopia, Costa Rica, Brazil, Rwanda and Kenya, as well as a natural coffee from Yemen that retails for $80 a bag.
Current new harvest offerings include Pulcal Guatemala with notes of milk chocolate, cherry, and orange, and El Meson Fall Harvest Colombia featuring pineapple, cherry, white honey, and rose flavors. The company’s educational approach and commitment to transparency means customers don’t just drink coffee—they engage with it as a craft, understanding the journey from seed to cup.