Viva Brighton Issue #65 July 2018

TALKING SHOP
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Brass Monkey
Very local organic ice cream
We make everything from scratch. Every
ingredient is 100% organic and locally sourced,
where possible. When we make mint choc-chip
ice cream, we’re using fresh organic mint leaves
and adding the best quality organic chocolate.
I learnt to make top quality ice cream at a
parlour in Los Angeles, called Carmela’s. I
did a short course there and decided that this
was what I wanted to do. I persuaded the owners
to let me a do a six-week unpaid internship and
learnt everything about the ice cream business.
It was brilliant.
Americans are taking ice cream to another
level, making new and innovative flavours from
the best ingredients. Their top parlours serve
from closed freezers, which is a bit different
from the trays of brightly coloured gelato we’re
used to here.
Making ice cream is a joyful business. Once
you get the base recipe right, the sky’s the
limit, but we balance the more adventurous
flavours with the classics. Salted caramel is
our best seller. I burn my caramel sauce just a
bit, which creates an ice cream bursting with
caramel flavour, and we do a vegan-friendly
chocolate sorbet which is even creamier than
our chocolate ice cream.
We’d been looking at this shop, in
Kensington Gardens, for a while. This area
just felt right. The locals are fantastic and there’s
a lot of goodwill for newbies like us. My brother
Dave is my business partner and he’s also an
interior designer. We didn’t want to go for the
pared-back, polished concrete look; we wanted
the feel of an old Victorian parlour.
We’re open from 11.30am to 6.30pm and, in
July and August, we’ll be opening until 9.30pm
on Friday and Saturday evenings. We’ll soon
be selling 500ml tubs for people to take away.
Brightonians really care about where their
food comes from and we encourage them to
come in and try our flavours. Everyone who
works here is involved in making the ice cream,
so we can all talk about what we do, with
passion. As told to Lizzie Lower by Phil Wood
16 Kensington Gardens
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