George Howell Coffee

George spent his first thirteen years in one of those New Jersey towns where one is always dimly aware of the looming towers of New York City on the horizon. They seemed to him like beckoning gates to a vast and unknown world. In 1958, his family moved to Mexico City, where he briefly attended a British school before settling into the Lycée Franco-Mexicain.

In the mid-1960s, George studied art history and modern European literature at Yale University. By then he was already developing a missionary spirit for artistic and aesthetic causes.

Soon after arriving in Boston in 1974, George discovered he was a frustrated, spoiled Berkeley coffee drinker (Peet’s and a number of lighter roast competitors were already thriving by the time the Howells left). Boston was a desert of stale, brown-painted wooden pellets and liquefied ground sawdust. George was suddenly transformed into a coffee missionary and The Coffee Connection was born. For the next 19 years, George slowly built up The Coffee Connection to 24 company-owned stores exhibiting Huichol art on their walls and emphasizing coffee as a noble beverage worthy of being in the same league as fine wine. By 1994, however, George came to feel that the time-consuming demands of financing, operations, and marketing in an acceleratingly competitive environment were divorcing him from what really gave him pleasure: his family (by then, six children and three grandchildren) and the pursuit of great coffee. That year George sold The Coffee Connection to Starbucks Coffee Company.

The Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) awarded George its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996 in recognition of his critical role as a pioneering standard-bearer of quality coffee.