H and H Coffee

Dedicated to the history of the Hoffmann-Hayman Coffee Co. founded 1899 in San Antonio, Texas.

2 minute read

A large formal black-and-white studio portrait, double-matted in cream with a gold inner accent inside a dark-stained wood frame with a fine gold-leaf trim, photographed on 2019-12-04 where it hangs on a lightly-textured cream-painted stucco wall. The subject is an elderly, heavy-set gentleman with wispy white hair combed back from a high forehead, heavy jowls, and deep-set eyes behind round silver wire-rimmed spectacles set low on his nose. He wears a dark suit with a small white pocket square just peeking from the breast pocket, a crisp white dress shirt, and a patterned dark necktie. His right hand is raised near his face holding a small white porcelain cupping cup; his left hand holds a black-handled cupping spoon with a deep polished bowl just below the cup — together the two-hand gesture is the classic cupping-table evaluation pose, not a casual sip. His gaze is directed down and to his left at a large cascading mound of whole roasted coffee beans piled across the right foreground on a polished dark bench. At the lower-left edge of the frame sits the cast-iron housing of a small shop-counter sample coffee grinder, its circular ring-pull catch-drawer clearly visible. Behind the subject the backdrop is a continuous dark studio gray lit from the upper left, the hallmark of a formal commissioned studio portrait.

The portrait is being added to the reference gallery with a tentative identification: the subject is, to our eye, likely Gus P. Menger of the Hoffmann-Hayman Coffee Co. in later life — the facial structure, hair, and wire-rimmed spectacles align with the younger Gus Menger documented in the UTSA San Antonio Light cupping-table photograph with his son Albert, and the framing (“company patriarch cupping the product against a studio backdrop”) is the canonical late-life commemorative portrait that firms commissioned of their founders and longtime owners in the mid-twentieth century. We have not yet confirmed the identification, the commissioning photographer or studio, the year of the sitting, or where the framed print hangs, and the title will be firmed up accordingly once those pieces are in place.

Together with the UTSA Gus-and-Albert cupping photo and the loose black-and-white print of an unidentified man at the drum roaster, this is the third “person evaluating the coffee” image in the Reference gallery — three different modes of the same act: a working cupping table with both Mengers, a formal commemorative portrait of (probably) the senior Menger alone, and a candid shop-floor sampling moment with the roaster and its operator unidentified.

Framed black-and-white studio portrait of an elderly heavy-set gentleman — wispy white hair combed back, round wire-rimmed spectacles low on his nose, white pocket square in a dark suit — holding a small white porcelain cupping cup near his face in his right hand and a black-handled cupping spoon in his left, looking down at a large cascading mound of whole roasted coffee beans on a polished dark bench with the cast-iron base of a shop-counter sample grinder at lower left; double-matted in cream in a dark-stained wood frame with gold-leaf trim, hanging on a cream-painted stucco wall. Subject tentatively identified as Gus P. Menger of Hoffmann-Hayman Coffee Co. in later life.

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