A mixer company that borrowed its name from the age of the first bottled sodas.

Thomas Henry is a mixer and soft-drink brand from Berlin, launched in 2010. The trade portal about-drinks.com described it in June 2017 as the “Berlin bitter lemonade brand” and dated its history to 2010; English Wikipedia’s article on its namesake says the Thomas Henry mixer company was launched in Berlin in 2010, taking its name and inspiration from him. The company behind the brand is Thomas Henry GmbH & Co. KG, a privately held business based in the German capital.

The brand’s name reaches back more than two centuries. English Wikipedia describes Thomas Henry as a surgeon and apothecary who trained in Wrexham, in Wales, and later moved to Manchester. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society, was a founder and later president of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1786. His son, William Henry, was the chemist who formulated Henry’s law. After Joseph Priestley published a method for making carbonated water, Wikipedia says, Henry manufactured “artificial Pyrmont and Seltzer waters” for sale in the late 1770s, imitating the famous sparkling mineral waters of the spa towns. The CLASS bar magazine put it more simply in July 2026: the brand’s namesake helped pioneer commercial soda production in Britain more than 250 years ago.

The modern company has always described itself as a creature of the bar. Its own site says Thomas Henry was “born in bars” and that its drinks are developed together with bartenders around the world, for highballs, cocktails, spritzes and serves without alcohol. The entrepreneur Sebastian Brack is described by the business magazine Business Punk, in the notes to an episode of its podcast How to Hack, as a founder of several drinks companies who sold two of them, Thomas Henry and the vermouth brand Belsazar.

The first range was a set of classic bar sodas. In June 2017 about-drinks.com listed the core as Tonic Water, Bitter Lemon, Ginger Ale and Soda Water, joined by Spicy Ginger, and named the tonic variations Elderflower Tonic, Cherry Blossom Tonic and Slim Tonic, the last launched in 2016 with the bartenders Arnd Henning Heißen and Phum Sila-Trakoon.

A ginger drink, a court in Berlin and a new name.

One product shows how much a name can matter in a regulated market. German Wikipedia’s article on ginger beer says that in 2010 Thomas Henry launched the first ginger beer made in Germany, a soft drink without alcohol like many of its international models. In 2011 the Landgericht Berlin barred the company from using the name “Ginger Beer,” the bar blog Mixology reported in November 2011, and on 12 October 2012 the Kammergericht, Berlin’s higher regional court, upheld the decision on appeal, finding that German consumers would read “Ginger Beer” as a reference to beer or beer ingredients. The drink was renamed Spicy Ginger. A Munich court took the opposite view in a separate case in 2017, Wikipedia notes, holding that “Ginger Beer” was clearly a soft drink.

The range widened through the decade. about-drinks.com reported that an All-Day Range of sodas meant for drinking on their own was launched in 2014, beginning with Mystic Mango and Ultimate Grapefruit. By mid-2017 the publication counted more than 50 employees and distribution in more than 50 countries, and said the brand had reached supermarket and drinks-store shelves across Germany that year, alongside its base in bars and restaurants.

Collaboration remains the brand’s working method. In March 2026 the Berliner Zeitung reported on a Citrus Lemonade made with the two-star Berlin chef Tim Raue, combining lemon, lime and yuzu with green jalapeños, and described it as the company’s first collaboration with a chef rather than a bartender. The paper headlined a remark by managing director Sigrid Bachert that “Made in Berlin” interests people, while “Made in Germany” rather less so.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all mixer and alcohol-free names: Canada Dry, Q Mixers, Thomas Henry, Franklin & Sons, London Essence, Double Dutch and Clausthaler. Mixer and alcohol-free brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from small companies that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a cocktail bar.

A mixer or alcohol-free brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the promise it makes, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its drinks are actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its drinks are made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A management in Berlin, partners abroad and a return to Britain.

The company has been run by professional managers for most of its life. about-drinks.com reported in June 2017 that Sigrid Bachert would become managing director for marketing and sales from 1 July 2017, alongside Wilhelm Plumpe as managing director for production and finance. In 2021 the trade titles Meininger and Lebensmittel Praxis reported that Plumpe, chief executive since 2013, was moving to the company’s advisory board, that Michael Müller had joined as commercial managing director, and that Bachert would also act as spokesperson of the management.

The company’s backers have also built links with other brands. Lebensmittel Praxis reported that, as part of a majority takeover of the Hamburg company Undone, a maker of drinks without alcohol, by Thomas Henry’s investors, the two brands entered a distribution partnership at the end of 2023, and in July 2025 that they had launched a joint range in the United States for the first time. A release distributed by BevNET in July 2026 announced a Vivid Watermelon mixer for American bars and shops.

In July 2026 CLASS magazine reported that Thomas Henry was returning to the UK, the home of its namesake, in partnership with Brand Tap Group, with bartender education and an advocacy programme led by the brand ambassador Chockie Tom. The brand’s line for the relaunch was that it is “born in bars and shaped by bartenders.”

The name needs a little care online. Thomas Henry is also the name of many unrelated people, and of the 18th-century apothecary himself; the drinks brand’s own site is thomas-henry.com.

For a design guide, Thomas Henry shows how a borrowed historical name, a bar-first tone of voice and a court-ordered rename can shape a mixer brand from a single city. Compare Fever-Tree, the London mixer brand that made tonic a premium category, and fritz-kola, the Hamburg soft drink. For this guide we use bar black, copper and paper white with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Thomas Henry’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.