We’ve been so excited to work with George Howell on our No. 4 Espresso Blend. Not only did we craft the espresso of our dreams—we got to collaborate with the wonderful people behind this storied coffee purveyor, including its namesake, George Howell himself!

Earlier this summer, we sat down to chat with George Howell, his daughter (and Director of Coffee Sourcing) Jenny Howell, and their Chief Operating Officer Rebecca Fitzgerald. Spending time in their company was a delightful immersion in the world of specialty coffee. They shared generously from their experience and expertise, built on 50 years of connecting coffee producers and coffee drinkers. Coffee, we discovered, can be so much more than a drink—it can be a way to travel the world, to build meaningful relationships that in turn bolster local economies, and to go deep when you really love something. You’ll find the extraordinary, and get to be part of it, too.

In creating No. 4 Espresso Blend, this legendary coffee roaster has created something truly special. No. 4 blends coffees from Brazil, Costa Rica, Guatemala and El Salvador, has flavors of dark chocolate, orange peel, and black cherries (a distinct taste of black cherry, but with a flavor that hints at peach or nectarine). We wanted this, our first ever espresso blend, to be versatile. It needed to be delicious as a standalone shot or in a latte, macchiato, or cappuccino, and of consistently high quality, whether it’s our baristas making it, or our guests who purchase a bag of beans to use in espresso-based drinks or brewing a pot at home. But even beyond being accessible and welcoming, we also wanted it to be truly distinctive.

“The people from Tatte’s coffee team talked with us [about what they wanted] before we got started on making blends for consideration.” Jenny explains. “We knew we wanted velvety dark chocolate and some deep fruit-like notes. That’s how we picked out the base made up of coffees from Brazil, Costa Rica and Guatemala. The hint of Montecarlos, an extraordinary coffee from El Salvador, rounds it out with a sweet acidity. It’s a little bright when you take the first sip but the more you drink it, the more it smooths out and becomes sweet.”

George Howell’s life could be a movie—one that started with bad coffee. “I lived on the West Coast in the San Francisco-Berkeley area from 1967 to 1974. It’s where specialty coffee was born with Peet’s, though I always gravitated toward other roasters, who were doing lighter roasts. My wife Laurie and I had two kids and another on the way when we moved back east.

But the coffee was so bad here!” he says with a laugh. “We had seen the success of coffee shops on the West Coast, so we decided to open The Coffee Connection in Harvard Square. There was no way we could roast coffee there so we did our roasting in Burlington. The question was, how do I get people to understand that we’re roasting our coffee, or even that coffee gets roasted in the first place? Remember,” he continues, “this was 1975 and people didn’t know anything about the process. In the end we put the roast date on every single barrel of coffee and every bag of coffee that we sold, to teach people that their beans were roasted, and that freshness mattered. No one else did anything like that for 20 years.”

George was also one of the first people on the East Coast to introduce customers to the French press, which is how he served coffee at The Coffee Connection. “It’s a single-cup brewer that lets you do any coffee on the spot. And you don’t have to stand there slowly pouring coffee over minutes; you just put in the coffee and a certain amount of hot water and tell the person to wait six minutes then plunge. People loved it and they bought French presses from us. In the late 70s, The Coffee Connection was second only to Macy’s in selling the French press made by Melior.”

Educating guests has always been part of the mission at George Howell Coffee. “I call it inoculating,” George says with a smile. “We talk to our guests about the farms that grow our coffee and how we’re able to keep our products consistent year-round. We do tastings at our café downtown that are designed to teach what age does to coffee, how it changes over time. When they know what it tastes like, they can go to our competitors, drink their coffee and go, ‘That’s age.’” These free tastings, which double as hour-long, informative classes around certain growing regions, coffee varieties, tasting notes, brewing methods, are offered multiple times a week at the George Howell Coffee café at 505 Washington Street and Boston Public Market. For the extra enthusiastic learners, there’s even a blind tasting called Name! That! Coffee!

George has been at the forefront of innovation and excellence in the world of specialty coffee “since he opened the doors to his first café. In 1996, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Specialty Coffee Association of America in recognition of his critical role as a pioneering standard bearer of quality coffee. He then sold The Coffee Connection and began working more closely with coffee farmers around the world as a coffee quality consultant. Additionally, while working for the United Nations and the International Coffee Organization, he helped create models of economic sustainability. Among numerous other initiatives, perhaps the most notable is the first global online auction platform for coffee, which allows farmers to earn what their crops are truly worth. In 2003, George returned to sourcing, roasting, and serving high quality coffee with an emphasis on single-estate and exceptional regional coffees, when he founded the George Howell Coffee company.

Building strong relationships has always been important. It’s no surprise, then, that in talking with the team at George Howell Coffee, the farmers are often the focal point of the conversation. The company is all too aware of how despite their shared desire to cultivate coffee of the highest possible quality, farmers face many environmental and economic challenges in their painstaking work.

Throughout his time with his multiple ventures in the coffee industry, George, who now travels alongside his daughter, has traveled multiple times a year to coffee farms in Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, Brazil, and many other coffee-producing countries. In all the years they’ve been visiting, George and Jenny Howell have witnessed coffee farmers, some that they’ve known and worked with for decades, struggle to hire enough people. Many potential hires move to more populated areas in order to get higher-paying or more stable jobs, working construction or immigrating to try to find work. George Howell Coffee hopes to help create a steady market, by buying consistently from indigenous associations in Guatemala made up of smaller farms that emphasize quality over what George calls “the industrialized mentality that tells us to make it more efficient, faster, cheaper.”

In their most recent visits to coffee farms, the Howells have also seen the growth of regenerative agriculture as a movement catching on at farms in various countries. Some farmers, observing decreasing soil quality, have started experimenting with planting other crops and even so-called weeds alongside the coffee plants to protect and restore the soil. Some are considering sheep to keep the weeds down.

Here at Tatte, we know the value of slowing things down, finding a seat in a sun-lit corner and savoring every bite. Taking your time is a little gift to yourself. At George Howell Coffee, yes, there’s a coffee equivalent. George calls it “a thirty-minute pleasure trip.” He says,, “If you’ve got twenty or thirty minutes, let the coffee reveal itself to you. Sip it hot, then wait, let it start to cool and every time you drink it, taste it. It’s constantly changing, and the more complex the coffee is, the more the change can surprise you. In a way, it’s like walking down a road or in the woods in that you see different things, you taste different things… and in that discovery, you’re different, too, enjoying something over time and really appreciating. From the coffee consuming point of view, that’s the beauty of it.”

There’s also a more formal version of the pleasure trip. Cupping is the way coffee professionals taste multiple coffees side by side to assess flavor and quality. It involves glasses, spoons and patience: the coffee needs to cool as it is “cupped” at room temperature. One need only experience a coffee tasting at the George Howell Cupping Lab to understand a tasting approach to coffee that’s more like fine wine or tea. It’s an education in terroir, or the way the region, climate and craft that went into the product’s creation affects the resulting taste. You’ve likely looked at a lengthy list of tasting notes on a coffee bag and wondered why you detect just one or two of them. Cupping will show you that it’s not you, it’s the temperature of the coffee that makes it harder or easier to taste those nuances.

Having roasting partners that are located near Tatte cafés means a lot to all involved. When Tatte’s coffee team approached George Howell Coffee, the wishlist for espresso was a blend that complemented Tatte’s sweet and savory offerings, many of which are rooted in Eastern Mediterranean and European culinary traditions. Not only were the folks at George Howell Coffee extremely familiar with Tatte’s offerings, they were also fans of the food and the coffee bar. “Most cafés are either really good at the food side or the coffees. But Tatte really focuses on both. We’re proud to be part of it,” Jenny says.

Likewise, we’re proud and honored to be part of the George Howell Coffee story, writing this chapter alongside them.

Learn more about George Howell Coffee
at their website, or on instagram and twitter