Hello there. Cheers for coming to see us. We wanted to do a quick writeup of who we are, what we do and how we do it, just in case you didn’t already know. So, without further ado:
We’re a young, employee-owned business looking to give people the choice to enjoy fantastic cocktails no matter who or where they are.
Over the past two years, we’ve worked our socks off to prove that there’s a different way to do things; great cocktails don’t need to be restricted to an occasional visit to your favourite bar. Instead, classic cocktail recipes and techniques can be the perfect base for building something new; cocktails for anytime and anywhere; cocktails that are perfectly balanced straight from the bottle or tap; cocktails that taste bloody fantastic.
To deliver on that mission, we’ve partnered with brilliant, independent, British distilleries, sourced the best ingredients in the market and tinkered with every serve until there’s no room for improvement. We’ve now got drinks serving in some of the best venues across the U.K, including The Standard Hotel, Homeslice, Birch Community, Vagabond, Shop Cuv ée and BoxPark. But there’s no way we’re stopping there. Cocktails can be so much more.“Between us, we’ve spent time in food, drink, business and design and together, we love a cocktail or two.”
The Team
Casey | Before founding Black Lines with Kuleen back in 2017, Casey led the drinks development at Soho House Group. He first launched cocktails on tap on the rooftop of Shoreditch House in 2013 and has been building and developing pre-batched cocktails ever since.
Kuleen | Straight out of uni & cutting his teeth in the world of Strategy Consultancy before stepping out of the office for good and setting up Bam Boo, an Asian street food concept. In the process of finalising plans for the first restaurant, he met Casey and the story of Black Lines began.Jake | A creative through and through, Jake studied photography at Manchester School of Art, before becoming a freelance Graphic Designer. He joined the team as Head of Creative/Social Media in 2019 and is also a singer/songwriter in alernative band Chappaqua Wrestling.
Morgan | Between the bar with a shaker in his hand from the moment the law would allow it. In 2019, the shaker fell out and a bottled of Spicy Tommy’s dropped in. Since then, he’s been getting Black Lines on new shelves up and down the country.
Curtis | A true production specialist, Curtis has a wealth of experience in complex food and drink production teams. Now, he’s part of ours. He also has a bigger love for great booze than anyone we’ve ever met – the perfect taste tester.
Think different, drink different.
Those who have a keen interest in art may know that we share a name with Kandinsky’s seminal piece ‘Black Lines.’ It’s among the first of his truly abstract paintings and is often seen as the start of a new era for contemporary art. It’s also the inspiration that drive us to create something different when it comes to cocktails; at Black Lines, we’re not the first producers of pre-batched cocktails and we won’t be the last, but like Wassily Kandinsky, we believe there’s a different way to do things. A good drink brings people together in ways other things simply cannot. A conversation over an ice-cold Negroni and a conversation over a Cobb salad; well, they’re different conversations. Drinking is about much more than excess and escape, it’s about storytelling and an appreciation of process, provenance. Great drinks are powerful. We pondered long and hard about how to celebrate the power of great cocktails and their rich histories. After hours of discussion, hundreds of cocktails and some very sore heads, we decided to entrust a number of emerging artists with the task of characterising the serves. Each one took the flavour, history, feeling of the cocktails and created personalities with their own style and influence. They now adorn every bottle we release; a little piece of art to showcase the art that lies within.
“For us, great cocktails are all about simplicity; a few great ingredients, balanced well. ”
Like any great bartender, we’re nothing without our ingredients. Over the past three years, we’ve partnered with some great, independent British distilleries; across the range, we feature Chase field-to-bottle Potato Vodka, ELLC London-distilled Gin and the UK’s first Sake distillery, Kanpai. We pair those spirits with sourced fresh pressed juices from London’s finest suppliers. Once the ingredients are in our hands, it’s all about striking that perfect balance of sweet, sour, bitter and spice. Crucially, it means drinking more cocktails than we’d care to count and months (and months and months) of tasting and tweaking every serve until we’re convinced that it’s ready to receive the Black Lines seal of approval. It’s one thing perfecting a recipe; it’s another thing achieving that recipe in a bottle that tastes as good when it gets to you as the day we made it. It all comes down to process. Stainless steel tanks, a specialist team who designed the production setup from scratch, the tightest modern filtration processes; they all come together to keep our fresh juices tasting as fresh as the first squeeze and the balance of every serve the same from the 1st pour to the 1000th. The final piece of the puzzle is the assembly of the serve. Classic cocktails weren’t built to be candy-floss covered Instagram fads. They were built to showcase fantastic liquid in a glass that accentuated the drinker’s experience and with a garnish that elevated the aroma and flavour of the serve. We might be trying to break boundaries and take cocktails forward into new settings but we also have a deep respect for the classics; simple serves, executed well.
Conclusion
More than anything, we can’t sit still. Our mission means constantly challenging drinking habits to create new occasions and categories. It means pushing boundaries and setting the pace for progress in our space. But it also means respecting the classics and continuing to do them justice. We’re young, hungry and focused and we’re here to challenge current cocktail conventions – from what they look like, to when and where they’re drunk.
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