Broncho Coffee & American Pickers
Early in the project we had almost no in-house file on the company, so we cast a wide net toward the Antique Archaeology shops behind American Pickers — the History Channel series with Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz, built around rusty gold in the field. Through Art of the Pick, Mike Wolfe’s companion brand for signed prints and the large-format photo book of his field picks, we purchased both the book and the signed Broncho Coffee 12×18 poster illustrated below (white border, Mike Wolfe in the margin). Those buys tied Hoffmann–Hayman collecting to the same merchandise orbit as the show. Separate inquiries to staff still turned up little company-specific H and H paperwork beyond what we could order from their shelves.
The Art of the Pick site published Wolfe’s short rationale in a pull-quote:
“Finding a pick and sharing it with someone else is my passion. The only problem was, for every pick, I could only share it with one person, and that got me thinking. I wanted a way to share all my favorite picks with as many people as I could. Thus, Art of The Pick was born.
— Mike Wolfe, Art of the Pick
Wolfe’s Art of the Pick run includes a rusted Broncho pail he was given in Texas while American Pickers was shooting Season 5. The image is a tall dark-blue pail with small wire-bail ears, yellow-and-red BRONCHO and COFFEE banding, a narrow PREMIUM ribbon, and a cowboy on a bucking horse, with heavy rust at the rims and long vertical seam. We hold this signed print—not the rusted field tin—as the reference gallery line on the Broncho entry makes clear. Broncho is the older bronco spelling for a small Western horse, still seen on period packaging.
Broncho Brand Coffee is a Hoffmann-Hayman line, not a separate roaster. A flat advertising card in the files, cream field and gold border, shows A Brand for Every Demand in blue script, the We roast it – others praise it bar in red, and Hoffmann-Hayman Coffee Co. · San Antonio, Texas under a row of four pack fronts — H and H Blend, Sam Houston, Menger Peaberry, and Broncho Brand in one frame, with the same bronc rider art the tin carries.
So one of Wolfe’s featured published picks is the same product family we are cataloging. In a narrow trade, the same names keep turning up — a small world.
