Meet the Founder of Dark City Foundry, Anita

Why I quit my 9-5 life to start Dark City Foundry

Hi, I’m Anita the founder of Dark City Foundry and I thought I would share the story of why I began drinking cold drip coffee and how the business started.

Why did I start drinking cold drip coffee?

Turn back the clock 10 years and I found out that I was intolerant to both dairy and soy. It wasn’t like I was having a glass of milk every day, but the small amount I put in my coffee and had with my cereal was enough to make me sick.

I stopped using both and instantly started to feel so much better, like 100% better. I never knew waking up in the morning and not feeling queasy could actually be a reality!

The only problem was coffee. At that time, the only non-milk options out there were long blacks or espressos. Wow, without sugar a long black can be super bitter – the day I added 3 teaspoons of sugar to my coffee and it was still bitter, well that was enough to make me stop buying coffee out.

Christmas came that year and my other half Gavin bought me a cold drip coffee maker as a gift and that’s how the Dark City Foundry story started. I started making my own coffee, shared it with friends and then started the business January 2018.

The cold drip process (I make it at 7 degrees over 10 hours) draws out fewer bitter and acidic compounds from the coffee. This gives cold drip coffee a lighter, more floral flavour and minimises bitterness, so no need to add milk and sugar to mask the bitterness and all the coffee for me!

How did the business start?

My background is as a marketing professional where I worked for almost 20 years with companies involved in large and small appliances, so other than making coffee at my very first job out of school I had no background in the coffee industry.

During my marketing career I had pretty much done and experienced everything from product management to marketing communications within a number of different industries. I woke up one day just wishing I had a new challenge, something that would make me leap out of bed each day. The idea to start Dark City Foundry and challenge myself evolved from there.

I did the usual path of working my corporate job during the day and working on Dark City Foundry in my off time. I well and truly burned out at the end of year one, working weekends at markets and during the week in an office. My favourite days though were those market days when the sun was shining, and I got to meet and chat to customers – I lived for those days (even with a 5.30am start!)

A welcome redundancy and the realisation that Dark City Foundry was what I was passionate about, now means I spend more time working on the business and of course drinking coffee!

Why did I choose the name Dark City Foundry?

It’s a bit of a homage to Melbourne really which is where I call home.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

The coffee is brewed over 10 hours overnight so ‘Dark City’ symbolises Melbourne while it’s dark and everyone’s sleeping.
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‘Foundry’ is included in the name as it was historically a place where metal was forged to create metal products.
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These days the word is applied to many places that create things. We thought that the word Foundry embodied the idea of the physical labour that's involved in all the steps from growing the coffee plant finally through to creating our cold drip coffee.

If you look closely at the bottle label you will also see the skyline of Melbourne in the background. 😊

If you have any other questions about cold drip coffee or Dark City Foundry I would love to hear from you at hello@darkcityfoundry.com.au or just slide into our DMs.