Ind Coope & Sons began in 1709 when George Cardon opened a small brewery behind the Star Inn in the market town of Romford, Essex, close to the border with London. In 1799 the business was bought by Edward Ind and a bigger brewery was built. Octavius Coope and George Coope joined the company in 1845, which was renamed Ind Coope & Sons in 1886. The brewery produced mainly mild ale, the most popular type of beer in the greater London area, but the development of pale ale in Burton-on-Trent encouraged Ind Coope to open a brewery there in 1856. See burton-on-trent. Ind Coope was the first southern brewer to do so and was later joined in Burton by such large London brewers as Charrington and Truman.

Once brewers learned to “Burtonize” their brewing water by adding the sulfates present in the waters of the Trent Valley, most of the breweries from London, Manchester, and Liverpool retreated back to their original plants. Ind Coope, however, remained in Burton as well as in Romford. In 1934 it merged with the major Burton brewery of Samuel Allsopp and became known as Ind Coope & Allsopp. See samuel allsopp & sons. The company was one of the first UK breweries to produce lager beer in the late 1960s, with a brand called Long Life. In 1961, Ind Coope joined a new national grouping, Allied Breweries, with Ansells of Birmingham and Tetley of Leeds. The group included lager breweries in Alloa in Scotland, which was renamed Ind Coope (Scotland), and the Wrexham Lager Brewery in Wales. Allied invested heavily in a new lager called Skol, which it hoped would become an international brand. Skol was produced by Ind Coope in Burton, Alloa, and Wrexham but never achieved the sales the group had hoped for.

A more successful beer for the group was called Double Diamond. This was first brewed in 1876 by Allsopps in Burton and the name came from its cask mark of two overlapping diamonds: the brewery also produced single and triple Diamond beers. In the 1960s and 1970s, the beer was turned from a cask-conditioned ale into a filtered and pasteurized keg beer and was heavily promoted on television and billboards with the slogan, “A Double Diamond works wonders so have one today.”

In the late 1970s, Allied responded to the cask beer revival with a beer called Ind Coope Draught Burton ale, which achieved overnight success. As Allied “rationalized” its brewing operations, the Ind Coope Burton brewery took on such cask beers as ABC bitter, Benskins best bitter, and Friary Meux bitter from closed plants elsewhere in the country. The Burton brewery had greater success with lager when it won the licenses to brew the Australian beer Castlemaine XXXX and the Munich beer Löwenbräu.

The Romford brewery closed in 1997 with Ind Coope best bitter transferred to Burton. Some of the Romford plant was sold to breweries in China. Allied Breweries in 1978 became the brewing division of Allied Lyons: J. Lyons was a major food and catering company in Britain. In 1992, the brewing division was bought by Carlsberg of Denmark, which renamed the division Carlsberg Tetley. Today it is called Carlsberg UK. All of the former Allied breweries have closed with the exception of Tetley in Leeds, but this was planned to close in 2010 or 2011. The only remaining link with Ind Coope is the small amount of Draught Burton ale now brewed in Leeds. That link will be broken when the Tetley brewery closes and the venerable name of Ind Coope disappears into history.