A Second, Clean Example of the Founding H and H Coffee Keywind Tin

A second, remarkably clean example of the same H and H Coffee keywind tin that founded this collection twelve years ago. The original tin — acquired on 10 May 2014 from an eBay seller in San Antonio and documented as “Our First Item for the Collection” — came to us heavily rusted, with chalked paint and corrosion across the top. This one has survived far better.

What’s on the tin

Front face, top to bottom:

• Red top band carrying ‘H AND H’ in tall cream-white serif block capitals with a navy-blue double-outline / drop-shadow, and a small cream-on-red ‘AND’ ligature centered between the two H’s.
• A green coffee-plant spray — paired leaves with a small cluster of red coffee cherries at the center — sitting between the top band and the product name.
• ‘COFFEE’ in matching cream-white serif block capitals with navy outline, running wide across the deep-navy main field.
• The early Hoffmann-Hayman slogan ‘“We Roast It – Others Praise It”‘ in a light-blue script line curving along the base of the tin.

On the flanks, each side panel carries a yellow-and-blue starburst cartouche — alternating pale-yellow and cream radial rays against a pale-blue vertical panel — with the stacked text ‘VACUUM / PACKED’ running top-to-bottom. At the camera-facing edges of this frame only the final ‘[VACU]UM / [PACK]ED’ letters are visible before the panel turns out of view, but the rendering is identical to the side panels on the first-collection tin, which our original post confirmed also identify the company by city as ‘H and H Coffee in San Antonio and Houston’.

The lid itself is a plain silver-metal keywind top — no attached key in this frame (most H and H keywind tins arrived with the key soldered to the lid; on this example it has long since been used and removed).

Why this matters

The existing collection image of this design (HandH-Coffee_tin_1lb.jpg) is a condition record of survival — a tin that sat long enough to oxidize heavily across the top and scuff chalk-white along its front face. The new image is a condition record of what the tin actually looked like new on the grocer’s shelf: crisp red, deep navy, bright cream serif type, a clearly-rendered coffee-plant spray, and the “We Roast It – Others Praise It” slogan still reading at full saturation.

Two examples of the same tin, very different points on the wear curve — useful for anyone trying to identify a piece they’ve come across, because together they bracket the range the paint and metal can travel between shelf-fresh and forty-plus years in a garage.

The tin sits on the same OSB (oriented-strand board) workshop bench the project uses for in-hand documentation — a practical surface, and a deliberate San Antonio tie: Armin Elmendorf (8 September 1890, San Antonio), the engineer whose wafer / oriented-strand patents and research sit in the origin story of OSB as a product. Form-wise, the tin is the standard one-pound H and H Coffee keywind cylinder — not one of the Blend paper-label tins, not a Master Chef tin, just “H and H Coffee” in its own dress. See the Collection gallery intro for a fuller note on the OSB background.