Our Collection

The Hoffmann-Hayman Coffee Company closed its San Antonio operation in 1962 when Continental Coffee of Chicago acquired the brand. The building at 601 Delaware Street was sold in 1972. For decades, the tins, jars, signs, and paper that documented the company’s sixty-year run scattered into attics, estate sales, flea markets, and collector cabinets across Texas and beyond.

This collection is the ongoing work of bringing them back.

The items here were recovered one by one — from estate sales, from families of former employees, from dealers who didn’t know what they had, and occasionally from the building itself, where sales ledgers were found above the office ceiling during a cable run and a shipping crate fragment turned up in an outbuilding still bearing the stenciled Delaware Street address. The walk-in Diebold vault that once secured the weekly payroll of sixty-plus employees now holds the collection. Most items have a dedicated post with provenance notes, measurements, and condition details.

A note on the photographs. Many close-up shots place pieces on a plain OSB (oriented-strand board) workbench rather than a studio sweep. The choice carries a small San Antonio footnote: Armin Elmendorf, the wood technologist widely credited with the strand-oriented research that became the commercial basis for OSB, was born in San Antonio on 8 September 1890. An OSB offcut is a practical surface; it is also a quiet nod to that line. A dedicated photo studio is in progress — archival re-shoots of the full collection are coming.

What you’ll find in the grid:

• Branded tins — H and H Blend, H and H High Grade, Master Chef, Broncho, Sam Houston, and related private labels in sizes from one pound up through three-pound keywind and family tins, plus a loose bench lot of vintage strip keys for peeling keywind vacuum lids.
• Crystalvac jars — clear and amber glass, small and large, with wooden handles and painted or plain lids, produced for H and H by Three Rivers Glass.
• Spices and tea — 1 oz, 1.5 oz, and 4 oz spice tins (cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, ginger, black pepper, cumin) and early H and H Tea cartons.
• Bags, sacks, and paper goods — 1 lb and 2 lb bag sacks, sales forms, letterhead, the Alamo Cookbook, parish bulletins carrying early Crystalvac ads, a large-format reprint of the 24 July 1932 San Antonio Sunday Light article announcing the new Delaware Street plant under construction (with the architectural illustration and the 1932 officers, architects, and building facts of record), and two reference volumes by William H. Ukers.
• Signs and ephemera — the Master Chef sign, H and H price signs, puzzlers, a Sam Houston branded insulated jug, and a slide whistle promotional piece.
• Contextual items — Tucker Coffee and Chase & Sanborn pieces and Delaware Punch, Pinch Kork-N-Seal, and other Three Rivers Glass bottles kept alongside the H and H material for the fuller San Antonio coffee-and-bottling picture.

For items documented but not in hand, see the Reference gallery. For lookalikes from unrelated firms using the H & H name, see Not Our H & H. For the building these objects came from, see the Factory gallery.

A gallery of our collection