Dangerous Don

Back in 2015, Thea Cumming founded Dangerous Don following a chance meeting over a homemade coffee and mezcal drink. She had been touring bourbon distilleries in The US which then led her to Mexico where she was introduced to ‘Cowboy Frank’. The fantastically-named Frank was fond of mixing mezcal “from the mountains” with instant coffee, sugar, and vanilla to create his own treat, and Cumming was hooked on this bizarre but brilliant booze. That led Cumming down the road of creating her own coffee mezcal inspired by her experiences with the legend that is Frank. She doesn’t use just any old spirit, however, but mezcal made using artisanal methods, shining a light on independent producers and embracing the fact that each expression has intricate differences by bottling new types of distillations rarely available to anyone outside local Mexican communities. The brand is actually named after Cumming’s father, who has had quite the life. Disillusioned with a vets course at uni, he and his mate ‘Big Andy’ decided to set up a life in paradise and move to the Bahamas. They would fund this by setting up a cigar-smuggling business, illegally importing from Cuba to the Bahamas and re-exporting to Florida, and when this plot was leaked to his contemporaries at the vet school Cummings Snr was named Dangerous Don – the Cuban cigar smuggler of Camden. The nickname has stuck to this day.