The Pombay story

Our Story: From East Africa to Amsterdam

The Pombay story starts with a shared idea between an Amsterdam coffee roaster and a distillery: take extraordinary East African ingredients, keep them traceable to origin, and finish them by hand in Amsterdam.

A barista pouring at the Amsterdam café where the Pombay story is told

The collaboration

Two Amsterdam houses, one bottle.

Pombay is the meeting point of two crafts that rarely share a bottle: specialty coffee roasting and distilling.

01

Amsterdam roaster

Steans Beans, a specialty coffee roaster in Amsterdam, sources and roasts the East African coffee at the heart of the liqueur, the same obsession with origin that Pombay is built on.

02

Spirited Union distillery

Spirited Union, the Amsterdam distillery behind Pombay, turns Eswatini sugarcane into spirit: the clean base for the vodka and the backbone of the coffee liqueur.

The Steans Beans roaster and Spirited Union distiller together in Amsterdam

Origin

Farmed in East Africa.

The cane comes from Eswatini; the coffee from East African MicroLots; the cacao from Africa and the vanilla from Uganda. These aren't commodity inputs bought on a spot market. They're chosen crops from named places, grown by the farmers who know that ground best.

Eswatini sugarcane fields at sunset, where the base of Pombay's spirits is farmed

Provenance

Traceable to origin.

Every ingredient can be traced back to where it grew. Traceability isn't a marketing line for us. It's how we choose what goes in the bottle, and it's what lets us tell you exactly where your drink comes from. From field to still, the chain stays short and honest.

Tasting in the tank room of the Amsterdam distillery behind Pombay
A Pombay distiller tasting at the fermentation tank in Amsterdam

Craft

Fermented and distilled by hand.

At the Amsterdam distillery, the Eswatini cane is fermented and then distilled in small, watched batches. It's slow, hands-on work: tasting through fermentation, judging the cut, and stopping before the still strips the cane's character away.

Macro detail of fermentation bubbles in the cane wash behind Pombay's spirits
Inside the Amsterdam roastery where Pombay's coffee is roasted by hand

The promise

Born in Africa. Built in Amsterdam.

It's more than a tagline. It's the whole method. The flavour is African: cane, coffee, cacao, vanilla, grown at origin. The craft is Amsterdam: roasted and distilled with the precision of two houses who care where things come from. Pombay is what happens when the two meet.

Stock a story worth telling.

Pour East African cane spirits with real provenance behind them. Tell us about your venue and we'll send samples and trade pricing.

Become a Stockist

Trade enquiries and samples for on- and off-trade.