When people talk about Long Beach coffee now, it’s easy to forget just how far ahead Lord Windsor Coffee was—and, in many ways, still is.
Long before third-wave coffee became part of the city’s daily vocabulary—before spots like Confidential Coffee, Cuppa Cuppa Coffee Lab, Recreational Coffee, or Rose Park Roasters became fixtures—Wade and Lindsay Windsor were already doing something Long Beach hadn’t really seen before: building a coffee shop that roasted its own beans, took coffee seriously without taking itself too seriously, and quietly raised the standard for what a neighborhood café could be.
When they opened in 2012, there wasn’t really a roadmap for what they were doing. There certainly wasn’t a local scene built around single-origin beans, careful extraction, or coffee as both ritual and craft. Lord Windsor helped create that language here.
And they kept pushing.
Lord Windsor? They led the cold brew revolution.
Before bottled cold brew became common—before refrigerators across Long Beach were stocked with ready-to-drink coffee from local brands—Lord Windsor was already bottling theirs back in 2014, pairing that now-addictive brew with label artwork by Long Beach artist Jake Crowley.
Now, more than a decade later, that same spirit of experimentation has taken another shape: bright, colorful cans designed by Long Beach artist Sayer Danforth, filled with Lord Windsor cold brew and sitting not just inside the shop’s refrigerators—but on the shelves of Costco Wholesale.
Yes—that Costco.
The odd couple: Costco and Lord Windsor
The kind of move that still feels surreal, even to Wade.
“Okay, I have to admit, the whole Costco thing is a trip,” Wade said, laughing. “When they first approached us, I thought, ‘I’m not getting into bed with such a massive company.’ Nope. But after my wife smacked me upside my head and we started chatting with them, we realized they’re a great account for us.”
What surprised him most, he said, was how little the retail giant wanted changed.
“They didn’t want us to change our taste profile at all. They didn’t want us to change our branding at all—they just wanted a lot of what we were making. In the wholesale world, that’s unique. Accounts will wrestle with you over everything and then order a couple pounds.”
This, clearly, was not a couple pounds.
The mighty Lord Windsor—or, at least, that is how it looks on Costco shelves.
Hundreds of Lord Windsor cans now sit stacked at Costco Wholesale—but getting there meant first proving the product in Costco’s famously demanding trial-by-sample process: the roadshow.
For the uninitiated, that means setting up a folding table in one of Costco’s cavernous aisles and offering samples to passing shoppers while the company quietly studies reactions. Costco is famously selective: fewer products, tighter standards, and little patience for anything that won’t connect.
Wade, naturally, leaned into the challenge.
“I’ll totally admit it,” he said. “I had a little sadistic inspiration within me thinking about trying to sell something like specialty cold brew to a demographic outside of the snobby coffee comfort zone.”
Not everyone exactly understood what they were having—much to the chagrin of Wade
And the reactions came fast.
Some people instantly loved it, surprised by its chocolate-forward depth and clean finish. Others, standing right in front of him, literally spit it out.
Which, honestly, felt perfectly on brand for introducing specialty coffee to a broader crowd: some people want cream and sugar, some want coffee in its purest form, and Costco gives you all of those opinions within about ten feet.
Still, Lord Windsor made it through—and now their cans sit proudly on shelves, wrinkles and all. Because yes, those cans are soft.
“The canning process is a monster in itself, and we were naïve to that for sure, especially with a still liquid,” Wade said.
The mighty birth of the ‘floppy boys’
Without carbonation, the cans naturally wrinkle and dent more easily than expected. At first, that bothered him. Then a customer gave them a nickname that stuck: floppy boys. And just like that, Lord Windsor added a little more personality to Long Beach beverage vocabulary—somewhere between tall boys, growlers, and crowlers, but unmistakably coffee.
“It’s a massive work in progress,” Wade said. “But in the meantime, we’re proud of our floppy boys.”
And maybe that’s always been part of Lord Windsor’s charm: thoughtful without pretension, ambitious without losing humor, quietly shaping Long Beach while never demanding applause for it.
You can find Lord Windsor’s canned cold brew at their shop, located at 1101 E Third St., or at the Signal Hill location of Costco, located at 2200 E. Willow St.
