We talk to Paul Crawford, founder of growing business Panther M*lk, to find out where he sought inspiration for his drinks brand
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00:00Hi, I'm Paul Crawford and I'm the founder of Panther Milk.
00:05So Panther Milk is based on an old Spanish drink that's about 100 years old.
00:12So in Spain it's called Leche de Pantera, which is where the name comes from, Milk of
00:16the Panther.
00:17And it's got a really interesting story.
00:19So the troops of the Spanish Foreign Legion were nicknamed the Panthers, and a general
00:24in the Spanish Foreign Legion asked a really famous bartender in Madrid called Perico Chacote
00:30to come up with a drink for his troops.
00:33That's the legend, basically.
00:35So this guy, Chacote, whose bar is still in Madrid in Hemingway and people like that used
00:40to drink in it in the 1920s, came up with this drink with rum, gin, a bit of brandy,
00:48condensed milk and milk, and he called it the Milk of the Panthers.
00:52We started, as I said, as a small pop-up bar, secret bar, we only opened on a Friday
00:57and Saturday night, and it was kind of like a pre-sub club thing, so a lot of people would
01:02go before they were going on to the sub club, and we couldn't believe how popular it became.
01:08All the young DJs coming through at that time, Jasper and Jack Master and all these people
01:14would drink in it, and a lot of the time the DJs that were playing at the sub club would
01:19come before they played and stuff, so it really just grew very quickly.
01:25It was meant to be a pop-up for three months, but it lasted four and a half years until
01:29my pal Fergus sold the bar.
01:33So that's kind of how it started, then basically lockdown happened, at that time I had a job
01:40in a tech start-up business as the creative director, and everybody in the office got
01:47made redundant because of the pandemic, nobody knew what they were going to do, I had just
01:53turned 50.
01:54A couple of pals of mine were running a booze delivery service, and they asked if I would
01:59want to sell panther milk on it, you know, everybody was doing the cocktails at home
02:02thing at that time.
02:04So my son and I went into the bars and we made up 30 bottles of panther milk and we
02:09put it online, and by the time we drove home, the guy had phoned me and said, can you come
02:15in tomorrow, we've sold out on pre-orders of it, so 30 pre-orders came in straight away,
02:23and it just went like that the whole weekend, and we ended up selling 160 bottles on that
02:27first weekend.
02:28So that made me really think, look, there's a really strong kind of cult following behind
02:34this, people who just love the drink, so I should maybe look at trying to do something
02:38and create a brand around it.
02:41So that's what I did, and it ended up, you know, some pals of mine, when the pandemic
02:47ended, and pals of mine then asked me to supply their bars with it, so Banana Moon and various
02:52other places, the guys at Lokal here were great, Columbar, the Beer Hall, and it just
02:58kind of grew arms and legs from there.