George Howell is one of the most prominent American entrepreneurs. He is the co-founder of the world-famous Cup of Excellence coffee competition and exhibition, the inventor of the Frappuccino drink, the coffee refractometer (device), the popularizer of the siphon as a method of brewing coffee, and the main ideological inspirer of the third coffee wave in the United States.
He also conceived and, with the help of partners (including Vincent Fedel, who is considered the main developer), developed the Extract MoJo software (and its mobile version MojoToGo), which is now widely used by baristas around the world for correct grinding and preparation of various coffee drinks.
George Howell was born in 1945 in New Jersey, USA. As of 2024, he is 79 years old.
At the age of 19, he entered Yale University, which he left after 3 years, having lost interest in his chosen specialization: art history, French and Spanish literature.
His parents, and later he and his family, moved a lot, living for varying amounts of time in New Mexico, New York, Berkeley, Boston, and other cities and states in the United States.
Then he traveled the world extensively in search of specialty coffee for his coffee shops. While living in New York, he fell in love with quality coffee, which began to be sold in several fashionable “hipster” establishments, where bohemian youth gathered in the late 1960s.
Although he did not drink much coffee, he loved the exceptional taste of truly good coffee.
When he moved with his wife and children from New York to Boston, he took several pounds of this coffee with him on the road. In roadside motel restaurants, he ground it with a hand coffee grinder and bought hot water at the bar to brew a drink in a French press, categorically refusing the coffee “scum” that was served in these eateries.
This is how he strengthened his love for quality coffee.
When he arrived in Boston, he planned to continue doing what he had done in New York: selling paintings and art objects. Finding that there was no good coffee in the new city at all, and that everyone drank only coffee from a can a la "cents a cup", he thought it would be a good idea to open his own coffee shop, which would be combined with an art gallery.
Having found such a place in Boston, he began to sell high-quality coffee, the beans for which he bought from one of the suppliers in New York.
His establishment, called Coffee Connection, became an instant success.
Today he is considered one of the main founders of the specialty coffee movement. Many people, from young to old, came here for drinks, socializing, meetings and atmosphere. In addition to the emotional, the practical factors that made his cafe popular were obvious: the focus on light and medium roast, which he made himself on the spot, which emphasizes the nuances of taste of very good coffee, which was prepared using a siphon, French press and espresso machine.
And the aromas of roasted coffee instantly attracted a large number of passers-by to the establishment. Quite quickly, he invented Frappuccino: a drink based on espresso, with sugar, milk and ice.
It was this invention that became fateful: people came to drink it much more than even the very large first cafe could accommodate, so in less than 10 years the number of Coffee Connection establishments increased to 23.
At the same time, George, himself and with his grown children, began to travel the world in search of the best coffee, which we know today as "specialty." This allowed him to offer his customers the best, which was not available not only in Boston, but also in the entire United States.
Howell was an active participant in the specialty coffee movement in his country in the 1970s, inspiring the creation of the SCA (Specialty Coffee Association) in the United States, an organization responsible today for the promotion and popularization of specialty coffee worldwide.
In the late 1980s, a large chain company with a green mermaid with a tail logo began expanding across the country, posing a threat to Howell's establishments.
He was afraid not only of competition in terms of the number of points, but he also felt sorry that his excellent light-roasted coffee would be replaced by a competitor's "black" roast, which completely kills the taste, aroma and essence of coffee.
He refused the first two offers from this company's representative for a takeover, but he could not refuse the third offer, when he was offered not only $ 1 million for each of his chain's cafes in Boston, but also promised to keep the Coffee Connection name in the purchased establishments, as well as the authenticity of the atmosphere and drinks (however, the drink recipes were later changed for the worse).
The deal also included the transfer of the Frappuccino name and an agreement that Howell would not compete with the chain for 10 years after the purchase. Thus, this chain company expanded to Boston, having about 350 cafeterias across the United States at the time of the purchase. As we all know, today the number of points of this chain is more than 35,000 worldwide (15,800 in the United States and 19,800 in other countries).
In the late 1990s, Howell was invited by the UN and the International Coffee Organization (ICO) as part of the Gourmet Coffee Project as an expert consultant to organize the process of selling the best coffee in the world through Internet auctions. The idea resulted in the implementation of the Cup of Excellence competition, where participants from different countries bring their coffee to the competition, and where it is tested on the SCA scale, points are given, prizes are given to beans and baristas, and then the best beans are sold online and at auctions with personal presence.
At the Cup of Excellence (15+ countries of the event), today the best coffee specimens of the planet are discovered and simply unrealistic prices are set for the best micro-lots. It is also a platform for communication between sellers (farmers) and buyers of the best specialty coffee on the planet.
In the 21st century, Mr. Howell invented the coffee refractometer for chemically determining the quality of coffee, and also served as the ideological inspirer, organizer, and financial sponsor of the invention of the Extract MoJo PC program (and the mobile version MojoToGo), which is today the standard for the successful work of highly professional baristas.
Today, Mr. Howell, although in his advanced years, owns a small chain of coffee shops under his own name in the United States, where he roasts exceptional coffee, gives lectures, conducts cupping sessions, and trains baristas.
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