George Howell (entrepreneur) - Coffee Pioneer

Coffee Pioneer

In 1974, Howell and his wife Laurie moved to Boston. Of the trip back East Howell has said "In 1974 we to leave the West Coast, I already had two kids with another on the way. We decided to move east to Boston. We drove cross-country. I took with me some whole bean coffee and a grinder. We stopped at the various Howard Johnson’s that were on the interstates on our way and I would go into men’s room, grind the coffee there, leaving it smelling a whole lot better than when I walked in, and then I would take out my French press on the counter, ask for hot water for 35 cents and make my French press at the Howard Johnson’s counter. And within minutes I would always had several people around me wondering what that was, and this is before I even had any clue that I would get into a coffee business. "

When they arrived they were disappointed with the appalling quality of the local coffee. By the time Howell had left Berkeley, West Coast coffee pioneer Alfred Peet was already successfully established in the Bay Area and had already inspired Starbucks founders Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl and Gordon Bowker to start their own high-quality coffee store further north in Seattle. Howell and his wife had developed a taste for the strong, flavorful coffee available around San Francisco. But the East Coast was different. He has said that "Boston was a desert of stale, brown-painted wooden pellets and liquified ground saw dust." Though high-quality coffees had been popular in the United States at earlier points in its history, Americans' taste for strong, flavorful coffee declined during World War II. Severe rationing of coffee supplies at home and the wide consumption of the newly developed instant, freeze-dried coffee among soldiers caused American coffee palates to devolve. Though espresso or "Italian coffee" did emerge as a micro-niche product in Beatnik bars of the 1950s, weak-tasting, cheap canned coffee made in percolators and on diner hot plates was the rule of the day until Alfred Peet started his company and began to elevate tastes in the late 1960s.