Back to the Grind: George Howell Coffee
Posted by TheShot on 05 Dec 2012 | Tagged as: Café Society, Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew, Quality Issues, Starbucks
Despite the article’s cringe-laden writing, it was nice to see coffee legend George Howell getting a write-up in this month’s Boston Magazine: Back to the Grind: George Howell CoffeeBoston Articles.
If you don’t know who George Howell is, you may as well be drinking Maxwell House out of a dirty gym sock. His coffee legacy goes as far back as the 1970s where — in contrast to the industry drive for cheaper, more plentiful coffee at the time — George was a pioneer in selecting higher quality bean stocks and roasting them at different levels to bring out their finer qualities. He has old ties to Alfred Peet, of Peet’s Coffee & Tea fame, and the early days of Starbucks and CEO Howard Schultz — who ultimately watered down much of everything he stood for.
In more recent years, George was the brainchild behind the Cup of Excellence competitions. Today he’s forging his own coffee vision in Boston now that his non-compete clauses have finally expired.
That said, Mr. Howell is no stranger to controversy either. It’s ironic that Mr. Howell rightly dismisses the overly precious treatment coffee has been given lately — including the frivolous nature of latte art competitions (something we dearly agree with). Because he is also credited with inventing the beverage that essentially gave birth to the coffee-flavored milkshake: the Frappuccino. (Btw, the name frappuccino is derived from frappé, which most people forget is actually a Greek word. After all, the Greeks really did invent everything — including the art of saying you invented everything.)
All of which is made much more difficult to appreciate given the article’s hackneyed and superficial writing. It’s a bit of a predictable paint-by-numbers magazine bio piece, right down to an opening description of Mr. Howell’s attire on the day — which, btw, included the incredibly relevant “button-down shirt the color of orange sherbet”. The article insufferably regurgitates the retold version of this “third wave” business as perpetrated by the many terrorist cells of Third Wave hijackers. It also so wrongly fashions coffee cupping into some elevated consumer ritual for appreciating coffee — as if it were a realistic analogue to wine tasting.
And in comparing the basic ratio math of the ExtractMoJo to “the precision of a nuclear physicist”, it smacks of that scientifically ignorant “Golly gee whiz, Wilbur, you must need a PhD in chemical engineering to operate that vacuum pot!” cluelessness. It’s more of that dumbing down of honest science and math in America that’s usually reserved for Hollywood movies. (Note: I often have the urge to bitch slap “A Beautiful Mind” director, Ron “Opie” Howard, for introducing the infamous “String Theory” movie trope of representing math or complexity through pegboards interconnected by string and thumbtacks.)
But don’t let all that stop you from reading it. Just keep an airsickness bag at the ready to get through it.
4 Comments »
The word ‘Frappé’ is french, for sure not greek. While the greek claims they invented the ‘Frappé’ as it appears today, prepared with instant coffee and ice, ‘Café Frappé’ is actually much older, originating in France for sure some time in the 2nd half of the 19th Century. ‘Frappé’ means to ‘beat’, but in this context it refers to cocktail shaking.
Café Frappé is called ‘shakerato’ in italian (although it today is very different from french or greek ‘frappé’)- and is often mistaken for being an italian word as well as greek.
Thus, ‘frappuccino’ is a word far from its ethymological origin
Alas, you forget that the Greeks invented the French.
I think it would be useful to watch (if you haven’t already) Oliver Strands wonderful talk at Nordic Barista Cup. He reminds the room full of industry professionals that he writes not for them but the general public. I think it’s an important point to remember when critiquing coffee writing.
Thanks for the tip. I’ll definitely go look for that, as it’s a topic I can highly relate to. I’ve given Peter G enough grief here in the past (when he was at Counter Culture) for trying to mold layman consumers into industry professionals — and contributing to the industry’s complete lack of outside-in thinking and failure to be customer-centric.
I haven’t made up my mind on Oliver Strand yet — as I’ve felt his writing to be an ambivalent mix of hit or miss, of trying to say something original vs. toeing the party line. (Or simply regurgitating what I’ve read previously in several other places without questioning it.) But this topic sounds more in the former category, which sounds promising.
EDIT: OK, just gave it a watch. Long and tedious and focused primarily on how print journalism works. I can’t say I’d recommend it. But I did like his “Food vs. Coffee” segment in the middle on how chefs are much more approachable and informative than many coffee pros.
And interesting how Oliver points out his Blue Bottle Mint Plaza piece as a pivotal point in coffee journalism.