It begins in the end of the XIX Century, in the heart of Victorian times. The mighty and famous British Empire had been immersed in a colonial struggle throughout Africa for decades. The Empire already dominated sea communications and commercial routes, as well as most of the merchandise traffic between the Orient and the West.

British trade domination was largely due to the discovery of new routes towards India, routes found by those first romantic English explorers, when their spirit for adventure and their enthusiasm for travel in the Far East led them to places that were both geographic and human paradises.

The most important discovery was the coastal city of Mombasa, located in front of the Island of Zanzibar, which, due to its strategic position, soon became the main port and commercial centre for the whole of East Africa, turning it into a place where the civilised colonial world mixed with the magic and mystery of the exotic African world.

This was where the first private social club was set up: Namely the mythical Mombasa Club. It was founded in 1885 by officials of The British East Africa Protectorate and was exclusively for Englishmen, those either born in the United Kingdom or who held permanent or temporary official positions or, who carried out work for the Imperial East Africa Company.

The Mombasa Club was an essential part of Colonial life and became famous and popular as a welcoming, idyllic meeting point allowing for leisure, where its members held lively debates or interchanged news, whilst sipping their Mombasa Club gin & tonics (an exclusive gin from England that was specially distilled and bottled for the consumption and pleasure of its members).

Nowadays, Mombasa Club Gin continues to bring a nostalgic reminiscence of those romantic pioneering adventurers of the glorious, epic English colonialism of the nineteenth Century.