772: George Howell Invented the Frappuccino. He'd Prefer You Forget That.

24:35100%. You were putting the limited data that you had on your menus. Let's talk about the actual coffee.

24:41George Howell:And serving the French press. That's right. Exactly, the French. The individual coffee. So that way I was proving that each coffee tasted differently. That is, and really expressing terroir flavor profile. I wouldn't even have that name at that time. No way. It's just, they're different. That's all, okay. And that comes from originally when Lori, my wife, and I decided to do the Coffee Connection. Yeah. we first thought all we had to do was buy really quality roasted coffee on the East Coast. And so we found a place out of New Hampshire. The only one we could find was gourmet roasting. The guy came to our apartment with three bags of coffee, Colombian, Central American, and Brazil.

25:29George Howell:He said, I'm going to mix them this way. That's Kenya AA. I mix it another way. That's Jamaica Blue Mountain and another way because there's really no difference. This is crazy. So he's literally telling you to like basically fabricate the origins. So that's when I decided I need to roast my own coffee. Yes, yes, yes. Right? And then when I opened, I really had to make it very clear that they tasted different. Yeah. And that's where the French press came in. Yep, yep, yep. Which, by the way, that's what top-of-the-line restaurants should be serving. Oh, yeah. Not espresso. I mean, we've talked about those with chefs all the time.

26:07is just when the busy restaurant, it's mostly for the staff. Yeah.

26:11George Howell:Coffee service. And to get the customer out quickly because the coffee's dreadful. 100%. It's bad. That is true. George, I never actually thought about that, but you're right. You don't want to have a lovely service of coffee at a restaurant when you need to turn the table. What about espresso when you're opening in 75? Because you really are focused on... I've heard you don't like espresso that much. You've done your research. I think Jeff Watts, a mutual friend of ours, kind of really got me thinking a lot about terroir and how brewing coffee under pressure really strips a lot of characteristics from the farmer.

26:44But yeah, I don't love it, but you continue.

26:47George Howell:Yeah, no, I see drip coffee like wine and espresso like a brandy. Yeah. Right. That's the sort of relationship that they have. Espresso is harder to get into, and it has the same kind of punch that a brandy, for instance. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's cool that you put it that way. Never thought about it exactly like that. I'm feeling it. I'm into this. Yeah, that's the way it is. The first time, it's like jumping in a cold swimming pool or something. It's shocking, the first sip. You've got to get past that. And then the problem with espresso, the difficulty with it. You can have a great espresso, right?

27:26George Howell:But it's very hard to do. You need a barista who's really pinpoint. I compare it to landing an airplane on a matchstick. Right. You nail it. Right. Very hard. It involves time, quantity, amount that you're brewing. Every coffee demands more, maybe 34 grams for one coffee, but 35 for another. Yeah. It's incredibly detailed. Yeah, filter allows for a little bit more of a margin of error. And also, it just expresses the coffee better. A hundred percent. It's a four to five minute process. Yeah, yeah. Right? Off the bat. So, it's a much more even brew to my mind. Yeah. I mean, but, you know, at your cafes today and at Coffee Connection back in the day, you were selling espressos though, right?

28:25George Howell:Oh, not really. Not really. Not really. We were making espresso the first year out of a Swiss-made Cremina espresso machine. It was for home. And we'd run out of espresso after about the sixth espresso, have to stop everything with the machine, pour more hot water in the top, and go from there. It was the French press and the drip. The coffee connection didn't have an espresso machine. Not yet. Later, we would. Later, you would. A year or two down the road when we had to rebuild. Yeah. Then we did have the espresso. But again, you know, I didn't take it seriously for a while. Yeah. Then once I started, the person from a distance, my mentor from a distance, turned out to be Ernesto Ely with Ely Espresso.

29:21Yeah. Which was unbelievable. Right. And you saw, you visited with Ernesto, and you got to really see the way these machines.

29:28George Howell:Yeah, I never met him in, I never went to Italy for that. But I went to his cafes when the SCA started happening in the 80s. Yeah. We knew each other. He would always, he was there personally at SCA. You don't see Ely around now. No. Right? Yeah, you see them around in the supermarket. Right. In the United States. But yeah, they have less, I mean, it's a huge company now. Exactly. It's a completely different thing. It's doing the pods and all the rest of it, which really won't do the same thing at all. Yeah. Now, back to your first question, though. When we opened with the French press and everything, we were the hit of the town.

30:08George Howell:I mean, we had ABC, CBS, and NBC coming to us, the local station, within three to four months. Wow. The ABC, the 6 o 'clock news, they had a person who interviewed me and did a five to seven minute piece that was called Portrait of a Coffee Connoisseur. Okay. Like I was, you know, like I knew nothing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you were clearly like learning on the fly. Right. But being called a connoisseur. But in fairness, you could probably fit a true coffee connoisseur in 1975 in this studio. Like the amount of people who were true coffee connoisseurs. Yeah, I don't, you know, in the States, really.

30:50George Howell:In the States, there's very few at that time. You know, no doubt Alfred Pete, but that was, again, very dark roast. Yeah. Not to my liking, bitter. Yeah. That was about it. I wasn't even aware of Starbucks yet. Your initial menus, are you charging more? Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, the price and everything else has gone up. Yeah. Dramatically. But back then, are you charging compared to other? Oh, yeah. Well, we started, okay, so I've got a photograph of the first barrels because in those days you were scooping coffee. There was no one-way valve. Yeah. Yeah, I have a photograph of Hawaiian Kona for$2.99 a pound.

31:30George Howell:Yeah, yeah. I mean, different era. And then three years later, it was way over 10. Yeah. I can't remember the number, but, of course, we got hit with a freeze that hit, the killer freeze that hit Brazil. in July. And prices over the next two years went up to$350. Wow. For green? Yeah. Wow. That was the C price, let alone any differential on top of that, right? What's the green price now? Which is the equivalent today. I read this and I go, wait a minute, that's not possible. $14. Man. Okay, so I don't even begin to know how we survived that. But as I say, in the beginning, we were the hit. I mean, and we had our, the retail was a separate section from the bar.

32:27George Howell:Yeah. So I couldn't make cappuccinos very well at all. It was my wife, Lori, who did the cappuccinos. I was in retail. Yeah. Right, talking about the coffee that we roasted and all the rest of it. And like pretty much hand-selling these bags in the cafe? Well, people would drink from our cafe, and then many of them would then buy the coffee after tasting it. But our bean sales, we look like the stock exchange. I mean, we're talking crowds of people coming in to buy. What's the dynamic there? What is driving this interest from and these crowds? Is it the flavor of the coffee? Is it the buzz around it?

33:12George Howell:No, no. It was clearly, I think, the flavor. They discovered something, right, that they never had it before. The enthusiasm was amazing. We had people literally jumping in the – because, again, Lori and I didn't know what we were doing. We were not business people or anything like that. So we had people jumping in the back to do the dishes and then refusing payment. Yeah. If you can believe it or not. I mean, the mid-70s was a special time. It was a special time. I think there was a little bit more of a community vibe in commerce. Like there was community and commerce came closer together. 100%.

33:53George Howell:Harvard Square, unlike today, was a village. Yes. With much smaller stores. It was amazing. Yeah. It was a great time. And people were curious. And you had people coming at that point to Harvard Square from Rhode Island, all over the place as well. Yeah. And probably people from the West Coast, too, who knew Pete's. Yeah. You know, and knew about specialty coffee out there. They did. And we did a range of coffee. It wasn't just light roast. We did everything. In fact, we did light roast, medium. We did, let's see, what was it? We called it full flavor. That was our light roast. And then we had Vienna roast, which was just the beginning of second pop.

34:37George Howell:And then we had New Orleans roast, which was edging further. French roast. And we even had Italian roast, which is dark as hell. And after two or three fires, I realized the next step was Pompeii roast. Pompeii roast. That's a good joke. I think it's funny that you say first crack, second crack, and good roaster lingo there. But for our real heads out there, you'll realize how a second crack roast is getting dark. It's very dark. It's definitely not the style. That's exactly right. And you're just losing more and more of what's in the coffee. Exactly. And that's, I think, something that is important to note when you're lightly roasting coffees.

35:16And, you know, we were out with Klaus from Coffee Collective. Yeah.

35:20George Howell:Klaus was coming to Coffee Connection, too. Klaus was. There you go. I mean, this is like these light roasts is what expresses flavor. Correct. Still, to this day, and listen, this is judgment-free zone. I mean, if you think about coffee and pay a little bit more, you're my friend. But the dark roast is just not good for specialty coffee. No. If we're buying coffee anywhere, the price is now, what,$5,$6 starting point. And going up, I mean, you know, we did pay for a special Lezmedal to Panama auction coffee over a thousand bucks a pound. Yeah. Which, you know, we have a few customers who are literally looking for that.

36:11George Howell:Yeah. And lots of Cup of Excellence coffees and such, which are going anywhere from$40 to$100 or more as well. Yeah. And so I like to cover everything like a wine store. Yeah. Good quality, moderate price, right? Because you have to be aware of the customer, right? But to me, it has to score what I call an 86. I won't, Jenny and I won't buy coffees below what we consider that end up. Yep. Right. And you're doing all, currently we're fast forwarding briefly to George Howell, your company now. Is it exclusively single origins? Yes. We have two blends. Two blends, just two, which is a very small number of blends.

37:00George Howell:It's an espresso blend. Yeah, yeah. Alchemy. Yep. Right. And one for, not iced coffee, cold brew. Cold brew, yeah. Right. And is that more for the wholesale side? It is a lot of it. We sell cold brew as well in our cafe, but reluctantly, very frankly. Cold brew to me was the cheap way to serve an iced drink because making coffee properly and turning it to iced coffee is almost impossible. Let's go there for a second. Yeah. Talk about Stumptown and the bottle cold brew Wayne Sorensen pioneered. What were you feeling, George, at that moment when you saw these really iconic bottles appearing and growing in New York City and then Portland obviously started?

37:52George Howell:I didn't go for it. Again, cold brew, you know, I mean, cold brew, the toddy method, cold brewing, existed back in the 70s. Tati was always around. And there was Filtron too. There were two companies at the time. I never liked it. I would sell the machine to people because in those days there was no internet or whatever. So I prided myself in every kind of coffee equipment you can imagine that we had in that cafe, including the spare parts. Sorry for the detour. But literally, if you were missing a screw to your French press or something, I had it. Like, that's a... You're like a hardware store.

38:36Yeah, yeah. In the back, you had all your drawers filled with equipment. Yeah.

38:42George Howell:Critical. Yeah, yeah. But you just weren't a fan of cold brew. No. The acidity's gone. Yeah. You know, and it's interesting that, of course, with cold brew, this campaign against acidity started. Yeah. To me, which was absurd. acidity is what carries the melody is what carries the song of the coffee so fascinating because we prize acidity and balance of acidity in wines but then when we talk about coffee it's usually like something your doctor is telling you to not drink because of acidity which is like kind of a misread it's completely crazy it's light roast is difficult it's by far the most difficult roast there's easy variation.

39:29George Howell:When you're roasting, you have changes in humidity, temperature, it changes the profile, and it's very hard to know exactly how to get to that perfect spot. If you under roast the coffee, you get the acidity people are talking about that they don't like. That's where, you know, your cheeks are sucked in into a vacuum in reaction to the acidity. But a perfect, a really good light roast has none of that. It has the sweetness that balances out the acidity. Take a strawberry. If it's not perfectly ripe, it's not going to be pleasant. If it's ripe, it means it's got more sugar development in it. The acidity is about the same, but you're not feeling that.

40:23You know, Jeff Watts always said and taught me this. is like the perfect cup of lemonade.

40:30George Howell:That's the perfect example? Exactly. Same thing. Same thing. And everyone knows, I think we can relate to what a perfect lemonade, that perfect balance. We also know what a very sugary lemonade tastes like or what that's under. And it's the same with coffee. And it starts at the roastery, but then you get into your extraction too. So that's why it's such a complicated, when you're working with light roasts, your margin of error is so small. It is the tightrope of all roasts to do. Dark roast is far more forgiving Far more Well let's get back to Coffee Connection I mean you grow Coffee Connection to over 20 locations Yeah Like so George you're going from Somebody who really is thinking single cafe Let's just get great coffee out To like really expansion Slow Okay so that We grew about one cafe Every two years That's all Very interesting And it was just, I picked them all out, every one of those.

41:30George Howell:It would be driving by in a town that I felt was right. You know, my dentist was in Newton. I drove by, whoops, there's a place for rent. Rented it the next day. That's so good. That sort of thing. Building each one individually. Dealing with the space. Each space had its own challenges, which made it more fun to express what you were doing. So by 1990, we had about 12 cafes. And that was it. Then Starbucks was really coming over the mountains straight for the East Coast and Boston and such. 1992, it was clearly an inevitability that they were going to be around the corner within a year. Yeah.

42:30I went for venture capital. And that's when you went from 12 to 24 or 20? Yeah, we doubled in a year. And that's when you took on some money.

42:38George Howell:And we spread out from the greater Boston area to two in New Jersey, one in Connecticut, and one in Long Island. But never in Manhattan. We wanted. We were looking. I'm sure you were. Oh, yeah. That was difficult to find the right spot, and you really had to know what you were doing. You mentioned Starbucks, and they're on the horizon, and then they're opening in your territory. Right. Simultaneously, they're approaching you. They want acquisition. For the third time. Exactly. So they asked you twice, and you said no twice. Let's start there. Right. Why did you say no? I asked Howard, is this just a real estate deal?

43:19George Howell:Right. Because I wanted the legacy to continue. Of course. You built it. It's your life. Exactly. And it really was unique. And he said, honestly, for the real estate. He was very, very frank. Howard Schultz was very honest with you. He really was. Straight up. You respect that? Oh, yeah. Very much so. So I said, no, not now. And then the second time he came, we actually created a fictitious coffee company with completely different numbers. And they provided then what they would pay for that and how they came to that conclusion. Right? So we could then recalculate what we would go for. Okay. Okay.

44:05George Howell:Because they were starting to open up about maybe there's a legacy that we could keep. The price wasn't right. And then the third time they came, which was a surprise to me, I was not, you know, I was thinking I was going to war with them. Yeah. You thought it was going to be a real, like, David Goliath. I really did. And they called up the key venture capital people and said, hey, what will it take for George to sell? These are your VCs are saying this, the investors, the ones who are obviously in the equity table. They were called by Howard. Okay. Yeah, they were on the equity table for coffee connection and they clearly are – they want you to sell.

44:47George Howell:Yes. So at that point, we agreed that I think it was like two-thirds of the coffee connections would be retained for at least two years. Okay. And they would continue our coffees that way. Under the same name or flipping everyone to Starbucks? It was all – no, they kept the coffee connection. They kept the Coffee Connection name for those two years. But it became clear. By the end of two years, they switched back to everything being Starbucks. And I was pleased because I learned the lesson that you can't expect somebody else to maintain your legacy. You just can't. I mean, especially with something like coffee where it's so personal.

45:32Exactly. You're overseeing roasting. Exactly right. In my case now, I've got Jennifer. Yeah.

45:39George Howell:My daughter. Yeah. Who, you know, a better couple than I am. Yeah. And who's buying everything. So she will maintain that legacy. Yeah, we'll get to that because it's a wonderful story to have. It's a family business. Experience a membership that backs what you're building with American Express Business Platinum. Unlock over$3 ,500 in business and travel value annually with statement credits on select purchases from brands like Dell, Hilton, and Adobe and other benefits. American Express Business Platinum. There's nothing like it. Based on total potential value of statement credits on select purchases and other benefits, enrollments required, monthly and other limits and terms apply.

46:19Learn more at americanexpress.com slash business dash platinum. Now streaming. Disney Plus invites you to go behind the scenes with Taylor Swift in an exclusive six episode docuseries. I wanted to give something to the fans that they didn't expect. The only thing left is to close the book. The End of an Era. And don't miss Taylor Swift, The Era's Tour, the final show featuring for the first time the Tortured Poets Department. Now streaming only on Disney+. So let's talk about this era, like 90, 92, and then you exit in 94. I mean, this is a very important era for specialty coffee. I mean, you look at like films and of that era and like the early 90s is all about having these big cups of coffee and that being a signifier of the yuppiedom, of like, you know, being part of this community of strivers.

47:15And like while that's very superficial, there's also an underlying characteristic of people are actually liking coffee and rejecting folders and senka and really starting to pay for it. More and more.

47:28George Howell:That's right. As I say, we were throughout Boston doing very well at that time. And we owned Boston. I mean, right up until 1994, there were pretty much no cafes at all. Green Mountain came to the edges of greater Boston and never entered. And they were ultimately the owners of Keurig and so on, right? Yeah, ultimately, right. I feel like there's like a little like departed mob boss stuff going on here. Like no one's entering buses. Hey, I loved it. It was great. Starbucks, we knew, was going to change everything. And you made the right decision to exit. Well, that was because the company, when we doubled in size, I mean, the venture capital people were great.

48:23George Howell:They really were. They gave us a great deal and so on. But with venture capital, there's always the ROI. There's always a deadline by which you're supposed to do X. All of this. Destroys most food businesses. Like straight up, it's like kind of the scourge of food is VC-backed food. And apologize for my VC friends. It's like really bad for a lot of food. It's all about fast growth and it's about business only. Exactly. And coffee second. End of story. So, you know, we started – I don't know if I'm jumping ahead. Well, let's take a quick, before jumping ahead, I think there's something very important.

48:59While you're growing Coffee Connection in the 80s into the 90s.

49:04George Howell:Yeah. And while Starbucks is looking at your business, you created something called the Frappuccino. Oh, God. I know you hate this question, and I know that you've answered a lot. But I think for our listeners, this is very novel. Yeah. And you said, oh, God, that's really funny. You invented the Frappuccino and Starbucks then – Let's stop you right there. Okay, okay, okay. No invention was involved. Okay. There was something called the Coffee Development Group. Okay. Which was developed by people who would also have a role in creating the SCAA, Specialty Coffee Association, a little later, right?

49:47George Howell:Dan Cox and other people. And it was the coffee development group. And that group, which involved people from the West Coast as well as the East Coast, Ted Lingle, who was the director later of SCAA, they came up with the concept of an iced cappuccino, which was done in multiple ways. But one way was with a granita machine. Yeah. And this was written about. So in 86, 85, and so on, I was reading articles that mentioned this and said how popular it could be. And actually, it was earlier. In 84, that was when the Olympics took place in L.A., and they did a test cart where they were serving in a granita machine.

50:39George Howell:Yeah, basically a coffee granita, yeah. Okay, this coffee iced cappuccino. Yeah. So it was around. Then when Starbucks was really becoming, you know, the ogre to my mind, to my imagination, I went to Seattle. And I can't remember the name of the espresso company. They were later bought by Starbucks. But there was a granita machine serving iced cappuccino. And so this lit up my entrepreneurial brain, tasted it, tasted really good, very creamy. Yeah. It's a ratio, right? It's not, it's getting the right dialed ratio with strong coffee, sugar, milk. That's it. Yep. Right. And so I came back and I gave to a really great person working for me at the time, Andrew Frank, saying, here, here's what you do.

51:37George Howell:these three things, and we need to name it and put it out there. And he put the ingredients together correctly so that you didn't have crystals happening. Yeah, yeah. But it's the smooth flavor note. And being the marketing genius he was, he came up with the name Frappuccino. And the minute he said Frappuccino, we knew. You just felt it. You felt it said something about air and lightness. And then Chino, we all knew. It just rang the right bell. It did. So we took it. And so for the first year, we introduced it in Harvard Square. It took off like lightning. And we then had it in all the cafes.

52:24And so you showed, yes, you did not invent it. Thank you for correcting the record. But you showed, you proved that you could actually sell it at scale. Correct. Starbucks acquires your company. and then with that, the Frappuccino IP essentially. They changed it. And they changed it. So I was going to ask you about that. So they obviously popularized it.

52:46George Howell:They wanted the handmade look. They had, I guess, two other people working in L.A. to create a drink that they had not named or misnamed at the time. Right. And it was really to have that handmade look to it, right? Whereas our frappuccino, we were serving it out of a soft serve machine. Yeah, exactly. Because of the quantity we were going through. Yeah, it's a little like a slurpy. Very fast, delicious. Yeah, yeah. Right? And to my mind, better than the way they did it. As an aside, you have to try Edith's frozen coffee. They have a couple locations here. It's become one of the most popular frozen coffee drinks in New York.

53:30and clearly an homage to your...

53:33George Howell:I got to check that out. You got to check it out. It is a great place in general. All right, so George, let's continue on the timeline. You exit your company. You sell your company at Starbucks, make a chunk of change. What does that put you? Like as somebody who spent all this time with coffee. Relief. Yeah. Relief. I sold because the company was getting too big. As I say, I had suddenly 400 employees. So I didn't want that. I was just discovering, I need to go backwards a little bit. In the mid-'80s, I got involved with specialty teas, okay, which really connected with the coffee, okay? And I was introduced to Wollandhaupt in Germany and was able to get really amazing teas.

54:30George Howell:So here I was selling typical Darjeeling. And then suddenly this opening came up and I said, yeah, send me a sample because they offered samples. And I got something like 30 packs of Darjeeling to cup through. So now I had tea cupping sets and all the rest of it. This is in the 80s. Yeah, the early 80s, right? And so we started selling a moderate-priced Darjeeling and sky is the limit Darjeeling. And we started getting some Chinese oolongs and so on and doing the same thing. And this was opening up my curiosity about coffee. And I'm asking, I'm getting Kenya double A's. Why can't I get a farm or something else?

55:18George Howell:And lo and behold, two things happen. In 1988, Bill McAlpin appears on the scene from Costa Rica with this laminita coffee that he's specially processed. He calls me up. And I'm not even cupping at that point. This is 1988. I knew about cupping, but I hadn't been really trained. And so we, you know, did like in a V60 kind of thing. Tasted it. There was a slight difference between his and the best coffee at that time. I think it was Villa Vista or something out of Costa Rica. Doubled the price. We went for it. Yeah. Right? And started getting that coffee. He invited me to Costa Rica. And I saw a farm for real this time.

56:15George Howell:Yeah. Not the tourist trip. he explained a lot of different processes and so on and then took me to the cupping lab which was part of Volcafe at the time and there were five five different coffees there and Bill McAlpin who loved this domination says okay George one of these coffees is La Manita the other four are really good but I want you to choose You did your first five-way tasting? Tell me which one is La Menita. You did your first five-way tasting? Yeah, he said, and look for clean and sweet. Yeah. And clean was the word. Yeah. So instead of going for the heavier, thicker notes, I jumped, I sort of like just guessed that this clearer coffee that I was tasting was the one.

57:11George Howell:And I said, that's La Menita, and I was right. You passed the test. Yes. I don't know if I would have continued my career. Yeah, you feel your first cupping. That's so good. And then Erna Knutson, who was the great innovator of specialty coffee. I mean, she's the one who named it specialty coffee to begin with. So essential. And I have to say, I bought only her coffee up until 1987. That is like over 10 years taking all my coffee from the West Coast and transporting it to the East Coast because it was plain out better, right? She introduced me to Dorman's coffee at the time, Jeremy Block, and said, you can buy directly from him.

58:03George Howell:She took a small percentage, and that connected me with him. And he would send me samples then now of coffees from the auction, right? Right. So you're starting to be engaged with these coffee auctions. This was amazing. It's a big breakthrough for you. Right. So I learned cupping in Costa Rica. That's cool that that was the first time you cupping. I relearned cupping as they do it in Kenya, very similar and yet very different in some respects. and then started getting these samples. So cupping was like, you know. So this is 1988, 89, and I'm cupping through 12 or 20 different Kenya samples. He'd call me the day before the auction and say, what are your favorites?

58:48George Howell:I'd say this, that, and the other one. What do you want to pay? And my answer was, sky is the limit. You showed your cards right away. Sky is the limit. Fair enough, you showed your cards. I have to give a shout to the books, God in the Cup. Controversial in the industry. I'm sure there's like industry people that probably like maybe didn't love everything in that book. But for me, it's somebody who was just learning about specialty. All the people you just mentioned, many are in this book. Yeah. I think it's a good read personally. Well, they were all people who are coming to Cup of Excellence again.

59:21Great, great. I invited her. That was Michael. I forget. Yeah. Forget the writer. Yes. I invited her. I persuaded her to come to Cup of Excellence.

59:31George Howell:Yeah. She wrote that book after that. Yeah, yeah. So are you a fan of the book or not, just to be clear? I wish she would have brought up more about Cup of Excellence. Yeah. Which had this huge effect. I remember reading and hearing about it in there, but yeah, it would have been nice to have that more. People did not, the international specialty movement didn't connect. Yeah. They'll call Cup of Excellence, put them together. Yeah, it's a great segue. I think I want to get into you helping me found Cup of Excellence. Just explain what it is and really the origins and how it really kind of dictates in many ways the specialty and ultra-specialty market.

1:00:10George Howell:Yeah. Well, that was the Gourmet Project put together by the United Nations and the ICO, International Coffee Organization in London. And they selected five countries where they would have people come in to spend two years coming to an understanding of how to improve quality to get higher prices in the burgeoning specialty markets. So I spent those two years. I was hired by Brazil, by Marcelo Vieira, really. who really was a very key, important farmer in Brazil. So I didn't work for the other four. And he had me go all over Brazil lecturing using PowerPoint. He would turn my PowerPoint into Portuguese, right, and translate what I was saying.

1:01:17George Howell:and at the end of two years... It was coming to an end. And I didn't want to conclude the typical way in which one would do with a big written piece of intellectual exercise that goes nowhere and that gathers dust. Yes. Which has been a lot of copywriting over the years. I wanted this to have an effect. And I borrowed from my past history, auction and cupping competition. And I should add that Jeremy Block, back in 88, before all of this happened, in 88, it was Jeremy Block who said, George, why don't we do a coffee connection competition for Kenya farmers? and I was buying 12 different lots at that time.

1:02:17George Howell:And you pick the winners and we'll put out, I think it was like 10 ,000 bucks. Yeah. And that will go to the co-ops that won, two-thirds of it to their infrastructure. That's good, yeah. Right? That model, that's the model. It was fantastic. That's the model, yeah. And so I said, yeah, right? Yeah. This has since become the Dorman's competition because Coffee Connection disappeared. Yeah. Right? But that's the way it was. So it wasn't very hard for me to come up with, hey, let's bring a bunch of cuppers from Japan because they were involved in this study with a gourmet project. They were one of the five countries.

1:02:59George Howell:Yes. They were one of the – no, it was Japan, Europe, and the States. I see. So they wanted – they had marketing consultants from those three areas, right? and then quality consultants as well. And I became a quality consultant for Brazil. So I just said, first, competition, right? Let's bring them in. So we invited, I think it was 20 people from Japan, from Europe, Norway, Sweden, Spain, and so on. And then Pete's, Jim Reynolds from Pete's came. Ted Lingle, the director of the SEA, came. A number of other key people as well. And we were in a lab. Okay. You know, in the middle of nowhere. Yeah.

1:03:53George Howell:Thank God the dust storms that were happening all went away. Yeah, yeah. This is Brazil. Oh, this is Brazil. This is Brazil. Right. In any case, we brought them in. And what has to be understood is that Brazil was looked down upon by everybody in specialty as being irrelevant. The big agribusiness, all flat or hilly but no relevance at all.

1:04:22George Howell:and what happened with Cup of Excellence was by bringing these people in and having had a competition first with the Brazilians they had to each give a sample we had 350 farms participate right off the bat and we then had a national jury that selected like maybe 30 coffees from that that scored a minimum 80 points. And those were then introduced to this panel. Panel. Yeah, yeah. Exactly right. And on Monday, we presented what cupping was all about. The key thing that I wanted them to look for was two things, clean cup and sweetness. Sounds familiar. Yeah. And also, especially for the old timers, people my age, because I was in my 50s already, and older, especially, do not cup and make a decision in the first 10 minutes.

1:05:26George Howell:I got it. These were, we would cup 10 coffees at a time, and that would last an hour. Right. And you had 300. 300 with the Brazilians. And then you had, right, they broke it down. And then we got down to 30. 30. And in the end, every year it would be really 40 or 50 that they got, right? And so on Tuesday and Wednesday, it would be cupping all of those coffees, scoring them. At that time, anything that scored under 80 was out and above. So we got down and then on Thursday, we cupped the ones that were winning, Yeah. Re-cupped them again, and it got reduced to 10 winners. Mm-hmm. And then the question was, what really worried me was, how am I going to choose between this Japanese guy, Hidetaka Hayashi, who really loved the number one prize winner?

1:06:26George Howell:Yeah. And, you know, the American. Yeah. Diedrich Coffey, Martin Diedrich, who was there. So you're, like, debating these final. Auction. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I came up with auction. The auction. So it all comes out of the Kenya experience. So if you score high enough, you get thrown into the auction, and then the market dictates. That's exactly right. Versus being a clear winner, gold cup above the head, it becomes a cup of excellence auction, which we know of today. Right, which suddenly makes people trying to buy this coffee. That's very cool. That's your idea. That's very cool. And these lots were huge.

1:07:06George Howell:They were 50 to 150 bags of coffee. This is not something a small company could buy yet. But what we saw over the next three years was they started to realize that the smaller the lot, the more the money. Yeah, yeah. Scarcity. Exactly. Yeah. Which is great because it allowed smaller and smaller farmers to participate. To make the most. Exactly. It's a cool idea that the smallest farms make the most. They were the critical element until, so Guatemala followed two years later, and then came Nicaragua, which was the next keystone. I was lucky. Did you taste the Esmeralda Geisha, like the first time it appeared at COE?

1:07:50Pretty much, yeah. What was that like? That wasn't COE. That was their own. Panama went independent. Panama was not COE, but it was a Panama.

1:07:58George Howell:Based completely on what we were. So talk about that coffee. I think that's a mythic coffee that maybe some listeners know about. Yeah. Well, again, the competition served as the perfect vehicle. Exactly. And in 2004, Esmeralda selected out a particular variety that was growing amidst their other varieties. They noticed that there was a difference in the flavor. Yeah. So they assembled just coffees from those plants, presented that, and that blew that jury away. Completely blew them away. It was so powerfully floral. Yeah. And they won first prize year after year after year. And they come to find out it's a coffee, a varietal that is grown naturally, natively in Ethiopia.

1:08:45So it became this coffee that ended up all those miles away.

1:08:50George Howell:Yes, it went through Kenya. It went to Costa Rica first and then was spread and was expected to be disease resistant. Oh, I see. That's why. But it was a very low producer. And so coffee being a commodity at that time, it was relegated to being like a puddle after the rain. And that was that until Las Miralda came around. Yeah. And then it went into the auction and became one of the early 2000s. Exactly right, with prices now reaching insane. Yeah. And quantities being as little as like two kilos. Yeah, yule is a trick. Yeah, I've never tasted this coffee. But geishas are all over Central America.

1:09:40George Howell:Yeah, this brings up the question of terroir. Exactly. Because not all, and also variety. Yeah, yeah. It turns out, according to people working, like Christophe Montagnon, working with genetics and analyzing these coffees genetically, the DNA, 40 plus percent of the coffees he's testing for whether they're geisha or not are not geisha. Interesting. Right. we're finding out that a lot of varieties that we're naming as such are not necessarily what we think they are. So that's a whole new world. And do you find it, is it ignorance or fraud when you start to do that? Complete ignorance. There's no like, you're told from the green, if you're buying it.

1:10:33George Howell:It's all been visual. I see. You tell this variety from that variety by the baby leaves that are coming out, etc. and now we're learning a whole other ball game a broader question and I've asked this to a lot of guests on the show from the world of coffee James Freeman, James Hoffman, Jeff Watts Nicely Able I think I've asked this 10 times and I really want to know from you, 2026 how much should a cup of black coffee be? it can vary dramatically from what is it now what are we charging We're charging around$4, something like that,$3.95, for what I believe is a 12-ounce cup. But, I mean, yeah, we do$24,$40.

1:11:25George Howell:But we will be going higher than that. Yeah. Making special occasions. I mean, coffee, certain coffees now are selling for$1 ,000 a pound. Absolutely. Plain and simple. And it should be. Coffee has been relegated to a commodity. Literally, it's on a commodity market. It's called Sea Coffee. And it was born in the mercantile era. Yeah. Right. In the 1450, approximately, forward, the last 500, 600 years only, as opposed to tea and wine, which have been around for thousands of years. They've had time to evolve and develop cultures that then really refine over and over again what they're doing. Coffee's just starting that journey now.

1:12:19George Howell:So that makes a huge difference. We've got the goat. I just feel sometimes we look at coffees in like$3,$4 units. Yeah. When we sell Coors Light at a bar from$9 to$14. No, 100%. And it just feels, and I keep repeating it, but I think it's important, is like it's just too low. Like$4, coffee should be X. We had this crazy thing with, we were serving a geisha from Panama at$24 a cup. And, you know, we had one reporter who came in who called it a parody of coffee and so on and then took our coffee that we had poured for her and brewed specially for her and took it two miles away to the Boston Globe.

1:13:20George Howell:Right. Right, and served what was already oxidized to hell in plastic cups and served this to people who were working there and said, would you pay$24 a cup? And they're all going, hell no. So you have that prejudice, right? That attitude, which is sad. The coffee farmers are classically underpaid. End of story. End of story. They need to be paid more. That's why I won't do more than that one blend, and that's for espresso, Alchemy, right, which we take great care on. But I don't want to do more than that. It's all single origin. It's either regional, like Bordeaux in wine, or it's single farmer co-op.

1:14:12Yeah, I like those two approaches. Period. I like those, like farmer or specific terroir region. That's a way it should.

1:14:18George Howell:A hundred percent. That gives, and we freeze the green coffee. And that's essential. Yeah. Because green coffee doesn't have a long lifetime at all. Yeah. And it ages in a matter of months. Yeah. It can come tired and already start, it can arrive on our shores already tired and starting to go south. And by the end of a year, that coffee tastes like wood. Yeah. And has none of the terroir it had before. So I don't know why more roasters aren't doing this. I wonder about that because you do see like these large stockpiles of green in some of these facilities. And specialty facilities where they aren't roasting every minute of the day.

1:15:04They just, the green sits there for six months.

1:15:07George Howell:It's nuts. Not good. And again, super well-known companies that I'm not going to name. I can taste the age a mile away. You drink a Guatemalan in December or January. It's from last year. It is. And it's woody as anything. All the sweetness and any floral notes or fruit notes that it had are really disappearing completely. The hemisphere of seasons is important. We could go along on that too. Well, that's why blends. Blends take what's getting old with the new and mixing them into a nice, you know, compromise. Which is why Tony Kinnicky's Yes Please is so brilliant. I love his coffees. He does the best blends around.

1:15:57Right. Some great work there.

1:15:58George Howell:But again, you can't get past a certain point. Agree. I think most people will recognize that. That blends only, they really, it does like leave you at a limit. Right. So I'm driven. I'm emotionally driven. Let me ask you, how do you taste coffees? I ask this because it seems, from my research, you're not necessarily about the, like, flavor wheel, that, like, idea of the wheel and it being, like, a single note or three notes. Do you seem to have a different approach? Yes and no. The flavor wheel is interesting, right? I certainly use it. I preferred the one counterculture did. Yeah, they have a good wheel.

1:16:39I love that. That's kind of like the one I've looked at myself a lot.

1:16:43George Howell:Right. But I remember reading about or hearing about percentages. Yeah, we do that. I do that. Talk about that. But we would do just like everybody else. Our bags, they were blue up until a year ago, would have three words to it. Oranges, blah, bitty, blah, right? Yeah, passion fruit and something. which started to really get under my skin. I hate that so much, man. Well, because it sounds like ice cream or something. It makes no sense. I'm sorry. It just is the worst thing that especially coffee could ever have. So what's missing is one other flavor, which I love to ask coffee people, what's the flavor that's missing?

1:17:29George Howell:And it's coffee. Coffee is an irreducible flavor. When you go and you want, if you love coffee ice cream, You can't – nothing replaces it. It's as unique as orange or anything else. And so our bags now show that. It shows you the proportion of coffee-coffee flavors to the strawberry or whatever else we're talking about. Coffees from Central America, traditional coffees like Catora, Bourbon, and so on, that variety is a coffee-coffee. Columbia too, I think of that as coffee-coffee. And people really go for that. There's a lot of people who want that, and it's totally understandable, and I love a coffee coffee.

1:18:15George Howell:Great Oaxacan Mexican coffee that way. But other people are looking for more floral notes, and once we knew about Ethiopian coffees— Rwanda, Kenya. Right, right. These are fabulous coffees. Yeah. But you need – so I'm telling people when you look at the coffee, take a look at how much coffee to the others, right? So you'll see 90 % all brown. That's the coffee flavor. And then 4 % of this, 4 % of that. 4 % lemon. In other words, it's like converting into – if I converted that into words, it's coffee. It's a coffee-coffee, but it's got a streak of this, a touch of that, and so on. It's subtle, right?

1:19:07And doing it visual states that, right?

1:19:13George Howell:Portrays that immediately. So you're not having – if you're looking at five different coffees and trying to memorize the first one, you can't do it. But visually now, you can. Yeah. And you want the one that some people just want coffee. Coffee and some people want more of a tea experience. And they want possibly a naturally processed Sinema Ethiopian coffee. So the visualization really helps people do that. Do you like washed over naturals? I tend to. Yeah. Even with Cup of Excellence, the first few years, I refused to have any naturals involved. because it's, one, it's much louder than washed.

1:19:57George Howell:And for me, essentially, again, it was really getting the cuppers that I originally had, coming back to what I was saying before, is you need to let, especially with a washed coffee, it changes from hot. You're starting to sip it at 155 Fahrenheit, and it's really burning hot at that point. You can barely taste very much of anything. It's only when it's down to about 120 degrees that all the flavors are coming out. So it's a path of discovery. Absolutely agree. From start to finish. And that's, you know, 10, 15 minutes down the road as you're going. And it can be delicious all the way to stone cold practically.

1:20:40George Howell:And then it starts to oxidize too much and it's out. But not every day. I'm like everybody else, rushing and so on, so sometimes it's a quick sip. Some coffees are simple coffees, like a simple wine. Great to have. Delicious. They don't change much. Others really undergo one transformation after another as you have different layers that become apparent and go away and then other layers appear, right? That's a wow coffee. And that's expressed in a washed coffee more than a – To me, yes. Now, naturals, can we have certain Ethiopians from time to time and other coffees that are naturals where the natural fruit flavor from the fruit itself is balanced by the interior, the intrinsic flavor notes of the coffee bean?

1:21:40George Howell:Oh, those are the best washed. Those are the best. Those are the best. Those are the best naturalism that has that entire imbalance. Exactly right. Yeah, yeah. What about these co-ferments? I feel your eyes are funny. In 75, you could have never imagined that co-ferments were a thing. Well, in the 1980s, the early 80s was the age of flavored coffee. Flavored coffee, sure. And we are in the second age of flavored coffee, plain and simple. This is ways where you can take a coffee that is not as well crafted and transform its flavor. And very frankly, that's exactly what I think it is. There may be some farmers who are thinking they're producing the best, but it's taking away the focus on specialty people who are buying it and selling it from the subtleties and developing yet better qualities.

1:22:37George Howell:We're not at the end of the trip of producing great washed coffees. And here we are going into all these detours, to my mind. I agree fully. We're so aligned on so many topics, George. I appreciate you being honest about co-ferments because I just feel like it is a crutch for lesser produced grown coffees. To my mind, yes. There are, you know, and now you're getting also the anaerobics. I kind of lump those into the anaerobics as well, which are buzzy. And a lot of cafes love serving anaerobics because it's a data point that probably sells some coffees. We buy from time to time an anaerobic. We've tried a few of these co-ferments, and it's just really not successful.

1:23:24George Howell:And as Jenny likes to say, it has this aftertaste that is kind of metallic and not sweet. Yeah, it almost is like you're pumping in some vanilla syrup into your great black coffee. Exactly right. I think, you know, listen, if you have a great Coferment and want to send it in, I'd love to check it out and be proven wrong. That's all I got to say. Yeah. No, agreed. You know, Coferment I don't like with anaerobic and such. Yeah. You know, and now you have, what is it, shock. Yeah. Thermal shock. Thermal shock, yeah. Coffees, right? Right. While I have my doubts about it, we always have to keep trying.

1:24:06George Howell:No matter how much I'll put something down. Yeah. I keep trying because I'm always willing to be called wrong. I like that. Right. It's good. I don't like robustas. Yeah. But I will taste them. Yeah. Right. And I'd be happy. Nguyen is doing some interesting robustas from Vietnam. So I've heard. You know, I tend to – and the roasting profile is usually not what I love with Robustos. I'm open-minded about them. It's hard to do. Yeah. I have not found one that I really like at all. So – but again, you know, I will check out Win Win. Yeah, yeah. It's good stuff. I mean, it's interesting. We are getting into the extreme subjectivity of this debate.

1:24:56Yes. It is a matter of taste, and some people grew up with Robusta coffees in their culture, in their home, and that's the coffee they want. I have to recognize that.

1:25:06George Howell:And I think Instagram, TikTok, and so on has really created a taste for novelty for its own sake. Well, yeah. so you know that's I like novelty if it also really adds wonder to the whole thing yeah you're right I want to wrap and just ask about your daughter Jenny you know the role she plays she's in the studio now so we're going to wait for her but like the role that the way you collaborate let's talk about that and really sounds like Jenny is is part of the succession plan of this company. 100%. Right. There are two key people besides me, Jennifer and Rebecca Fitzgerald as well. She really, I've always had to rely on somebody who keeps my feet on the ground.

1:26:03George Howell:I'm the guy at 40 ,000 feet, right, who's in love, right? Yeah. Coffee guy, you're in love with everything. You know, that's what coffee guys are. Totally. That's my thing. Totally. And communicating that to the customer as best I possibly can. Rebecca really follows the numbers but also the detail. Stops me or Jenny if we're going to the right or to the left with clear lines, right? I still get my way. Your name is on the back. I still get your way. But that's been essential to keep the business straight. And where is the business heading? I know you have cafes. It's heading with slow growth.

1:26:51George Howell:I'm not after any kind of fast growth because I've seen how that worked with Coffee Connection. It's too easy to lose the focus of the quality. Each cafe has to be really carefully chosen. Right now in this particular moment in time where tomorrow could be completely different than today as we're seeing with the war that's going on and the tariffs that were happening before and all the rest of it and real estate, it's tough to find locations that are right. Location, location, location. It's really critical. We have the internet now. Yeah. The internet is the ideal, I should say, an ideal forum upon which to really express what we're after and to teach.

1:27:48So that's where we will be aiming a major focus. So doing online retail. Do you sell your coffees retail? Oh, yeah. I absolutely do. Do you have a retail business? That's growing faster right now than anything else. I'd imagine. How many cafes do you have now? I like to think five. Yeah. You like to think five. Okay. Yeah. Unless you have a secret one. I don't know where you got six from, Jenny. There's a secret one somewhere that's underground.

1:28:15George Howell:But five, yes. And three that are really critical in the downtown Boston area. Yeah, yeah. And one in Cambridge in Harvard Square. Yeah. Through a bookstore. Okay. Love that. Yeah. Love Struck. Love Struck. Oh, that's wonderful to have a collaboration with a bookstore. Yes. Because it's two wonderful things, especially coffee in an independent bookstore. Right. I mean, you've got also the... It's always been something I've wanted to do, so there it is. So it's really, to me, four key cafes is what it is. And maybe we'll see you in New York sometime. George Howell Cafe. We're always interested.

1:28:54George Howell:I have to have the right crew and the right person running. I mean, that has to be done absolutely right. that's tricky. But yeah, I would like to be in New York. I'd love to have you in New York too. I'd love to buy your coffees in New York, but I guess I'll have to go to Boston in the time being. Indeed. George Howell, this has been so much fun. This has been a real honor and pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us, This Taste. Thank you, Matt.

1:29:25This is Taste is hosted and produced by Eliza Abarbanal and me, Matt Rodbar. The show is edited by lead producer Clayton Gumbert and supervised by Pat Stango, director of media production and development at Penguin Random House. Thanks to Shalia Harris and the production team at Penguin Random House. Theme music by Steve Rydell. Episode portraits by Louise Zergon Pomeroy. Logo design by Ellie Skirzat and Ian Dingham. Visit Taste Online at tastecooking.com And make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to keep updated on all cool things in the world of taste. Stitch Fix. Stop shopping, get styled.

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