Spotting Coffee Pots in Museum Collections | Oval Coffee Roasters March 2026

Oval Coffee Roasters Journal

Published March 23, 2026

By Christopher Alspach, Co-Founder and Director of Coffee, Oval Coffee Roasters

Christopher Alspach serving Oval Coffee Roasters at Dumbo Market in Brooklyn in March 2026.

Last week we did a tasting at a Sprouts Farmers Market in Philadelphia. Culturally it is about as close as you can get to New York outside of New York, and still, the grocery shopping difference is immediate.

New York grocery has its own rhythm

The store was spacious and everyone was filling carts to bring back to cars parked somewhere nearby. It felt familiar from time living in Portland, but in a way that made New York feel very far away.

In most of the country, grocery shopping is a weekly task. In New York, it is part of daily life.

There is no single shopping day. You go often and carry what you can. You decide what is for dinner on the walk home. Products get noticed differently, and as a shopper you are part of a series of small decisions made again and again.

The stores in NYC reflect this. They are smaller. The lines can be long, improbably long, but they move quickly. There is a rhythm to it.

It is hard to define, but it feels more personal. The food you buy feels closer to your day, less like inventory and more like a set of choices you are making in real time.

We have always felt at home in that environment. It rewards attention, quality, and things that hold up to repeat encounters. New York grocery is not just a channel for us. It is the way we like to live.

Recent New York City stores carrying Oval Coffee Roasters

These are the kinds of neighborhood stores we love, places people already rely on and return to often. If you are nearby, we hope you will keep an eye out for Oval on shelf.

For the latest locations, visit our Store Locator.

Coffee, Here and There #1

If you love coffee, you start to notice it even in places where coffee is not the main focus. A painting, a design-forward mug, something in a case that no one is really looking at. We will share a few of those here each month, mostly from art museums and historic homes.

If you spend enough time in museums, you may notice the frequent presence of coffee ephemera, referenced in major works or present in the form of brewers and serving ware displayed as art or fine craft.

Coffee service appears not just for its craftsmanship, but for what it suggests: coffee presented as a deliberate pleasure.

Since coffee ephemera turns up in so many museums and historic homes, I will mention a recent favorite at the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side. It is well worth a visit, built around works from Estée Lauder’s collection, and free on Friday evenings. Photography is not allowed, which is an excellent policy, so we are including an image from their site to give a sense of it.

Dagobert Peche coffee and tea service on display at Neue Galerie New York.

This piece points to a different way of enjoying coffee, one that seems calmer and more intentional. After seeing it, I keep wanting to serve coffee on a silver tray, and even bought a vintage set once to experiment. It arrived broken, which felt like a sign. I have not figured out how this kind of presentation fits into the present in a pop-up or tasting, or if anyone would actually want it. But it feels like there should be a place for it.

If you have come across any coffee artwork you think is excellent, or just worth noting, we would love to hear about it.

For now, please enjoy these objects at the Neue Galerie by Dagobert Peche, whose work pushed against early modernist restraint without ever losing precision. It is not a bad way to imagine your coffee arriving.

Coffee Question #3

How is decaf coffee produced?

The short answer: everything that can be taken out of the coffee is taken out, the caffeine is separated, and the rest goes back.

Decaffeination sounds complicated. It is, if you are the one running the process. As a drinker, the idea is fairly simple.

You start with green coffee, the raw seed before roasting, and pull out everything that can be dissolved. Not just the caffeine. Everything. Then the caffeine is separated from that solution, and what remains is returned to the coffee.

That is the basic idea.

There are a few ways to get there. Water, CO₂, or solvents designed to bind to caffeine. Different approaches, same goal. People sometimes ask if one tastes better than another. The answer is yes, but much less than it used to.

What matters most is that decaf coffee is not simply regular coffee with less character. When the process is done well, and when the coffee being decaffeinated is strong to begin with, the result can still be sweet, structured, and fully enjoyable.

This is one reason Half Caff coffee can be such a useful everyday option. It gives you some of the lift of regular coffee while dialing the total caffeine down to something steadier and more livable.

Explore Riverside Half Caff Coffee

Riverside Half Caff Whole Bean Coffee

Riverside is a Half Caff light-to-medium roast coffee made with a 50/50 blend of caffeinated coffee and sugarcane process decaf for steady rhythm, smooth sweetness, and lower-caffeine balance.

Shop Riverside Whole Bean

Riverside Half Caff Pour Over Coffee

A Half Caff Pour Over Single Serve crafted for calm energy, everyday balance, office coffee, travel, gifting, and easy brewing anywhere hot water is available.

Shop Riverside Pour Over

Browse: Half Caff Coffee Whole Bean Coffee Pour Over Single Serves Half Caff 100-Pack Bulk Case All Coffee

Coffee catering in New York City

Beyond retail, Oval Coffee Roasters also serves events, hospitality programs, and coffee catering across New York City and the Tri-State area. That includes Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, Staten Island, Long Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

Whether the setting is a private tasting, a design-forward brand event, a hospitality activation, or a more intimate gathering, we think coffee service should feel aligned with the room rather than added on top of it.

Oval Coffee Roasters is roasted in Hunts Point in The Bronx and available across New York City, the Tri-State area, and select retail partners nationwide.

Helpful pages: About Us Store Locator Wholesale Coffee Catering NYC Video Gallery Sitemap Contact Us