George Howell founded Coffee Connection in Cambridge, MA in 1974. For the following 2 decades, he grew Coffee Connection into 24 company-owned stores throughout New England, emphasizing the highest quality coffees. In 1994, Howell sold his high-quality popular coffee company to Starbucks. After being awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Specialty Coffee Association of America in 1996, he then returned to traveling to coffee farms world-wide, and in 1997 began working for both The United Nations and the International Coffee Organization in their effort to create models of economic sustainability for coffee farmers. This led directly to the co-founding of the 1999 Cup Of Excellence program, designed to help break the commodity/price cycle in the specialty coffee industry by treating coffee as a noble beverage, worthy of the same respect as fine wine.

Howell, educated at Yale University, lives in Wayland, MA, and travels extensively to coffee producing farms. He has written for many food and beverage publications, has guest lectured at Harvard University, Boston University and Johnson & Wales and is working on a new book about producing high quality coffee. George felt that to help develop the next stage of coffee quality appreciation in the US market he should understand its problems and opportunities directly by participating in its marketplace. He thus created the George Howell Coffee Company, LLC in 2004 and its Terroir Coffee brand (www.terroircoffee.com) – which sells strictly single estate coffees. In 2007 he received the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe’s highest honor, their Better-Coffee-World award.

POSTED: Saturday, May 17, 2008