Cold brew company Sandows London started exactly one day after last year’s London Coffee Festival. At the 2015 event (just concluded this past weekend) Sandows made a splash by serving up cold brew on draught, nitro, in a signature cocktail, and from their highly English glass flasks. The company—owned and operated by two former Tap Coffee employees, Hugh Duffie and Luke Suddards—have establsished quite a name for themselves over the last year in London, and can now be found in the city’s high-end cocktail establishments and even higher-end department stores.
“We wanted to do something British,” Duffie told me over a Morning Tonic, their signature cocktail—a gin and tonic which Hugh describes as a “classic summer British drink” with the addition of cold brew. The company’s name is a nod to classic Victorian strongman Eugen Sandow. Duffies explained, “We wanted a Victorian feel without being overly twee.”
Sandows London cold brew flasks are delivered throughout the UK and found in UK Whole Foods Markets and Fortnum & Mason, a three-hundred year old business which bills itself as “the most luxurious department store in the world”. Last weekend at the London Coffee Festival, Duffies and Suddards serve cold brew draught from a dispenser framed by blue Victorian-style cross barbells, their logo designed by their friends at Studio Thomas.
For now, the coffees are brewed by the founders, each flask is still bottled and labeled by hand. Duffies and Suddards are looking to the future, recently collecting £125,000 in a round of funding. What’s next for the pair? Hold on, they’ve got to run back to their facility to bottle up more cold brew (they nearly sold out the first day of the festival.)
Not in London? Make the Sandows London Morning Tonic at home!
Fill a glass with ice and pour 25ml of gin.
Sandow’s uses a small batch Scottish gin Caorunn.
Add 25ml of cold brew.
Sandow’s cold brew on tap is a Peruvian coffee roasted by Climpson & Sons.
Top with tonic water (approximately 75ml)
Enjoy with a good book.
We recommend The Perfect Man: The Muscular Life and Times of Eugen Sandow, Victorian Strongman by David Waller.
Zachary Carlsen is a co-founder and managing editor at Sprudge.com.
