Not in a Rush: Rich Drams and New Casks at Thornaes Distillery

Stepping off the train at Kagerup, you’d forget you just left central Copenhagen on a local train. The short walk to the distillery is bucolic, with thatched roofs, old sawmills, and horses in the fields. Honestly, I can recommend a visit to the area even if you're not here for the distillery (for some reason...).

This distillery was a farm back in the nineteenth century - the stillroom was a horse stable. When it was damaged by fire twenty years ago, the farmer couldn’t afford to repair everything. Come 2019, Thornaes came into the picture and spent six months setting everything up. 

I met Torben for a tour that we planned after I tried more of Thornaes’ new whiskies at the Kolding Messe earlier this year. You have a little visitors’ centre adjoining the stillroom, and the whole distillery is still a small team. A team of just three balances all the production between them. They also do gin and contract distilling alongside whisky.

For the distillation itself, Torben explains that they 'want to get everything from the secondary fermentation - we’re not in a rush.' The whole process is manual, as Torben believes that ‘if we just pushed buttons, the DNA of the distillery would be lost’. The round bulb shape of the stills and squat necks encourage more heavy oils to come over, and the stills are run quite slowly. The spirit run usually takes at least ten hours. This whole approach produces ‘a very creamy spirit’. 

All Thornaes’ grain is organic, and everything produced after 2024 uses grain exclusively from the farm here. This means Thornaes will, over time, become a single estate distillery! Or at least it will have some expressions which work for that - it remains to be seen if the fields here can provide the whole capacity needed.

The Details

• 1600L semi-lauter mash tun
• 140 hour fermentation using traditional distillers’ yeast
• Three 1000L pot stills from Iberian Coopers (2x wash, 1x spirit)
• Shell and tube condensers
• 4 batches per week , distillery running at 80% total capacity
• 3000L of spirit put into casks Jan-June 2025

The warehouse currently has around 400 casks in it, but there’s plenty more space to fill! Most of their wood is ex-bourbon (60%-ish), with quite a few STR (18%-ish) and the rest mostly being sherry. Thornaes started off with 50L casks, but have worked up to 130L and 250L since then. 

They also have some rye spirit ageing in this warehouse - hopefully the EU-Canada rye debacle will have been fixed by the time it’s ready! More uniquely, oat whisky is maturing here. Oats play a big part in Danish agriculture, Torben tells me, and there are specific local varieties available in this area. It doesn’t need malting, he claims - a little barley malt is used for enzymatic power, but oats self-filter with their husks much better than some other grains…

Thornaes’ bourbon casks are 125L quarter casks re-coopered in Speyside. These are quite greedy on the angels’ share, so they won’t be part of the distillery’s long term approach. The idea with sherry casks here is to focus on drier varieties, and we walk past some amontillado, palo cortado, and PX casks as the rain drums hard on the roof. 

They also have some casks of Danish pinot noir - I didn’t even realise you could grow grapes like that in Denmark! I only knew about fruit wines here, but in fact there are vineyards in Denmark and the southern tip of Sweden. Apparently it’s a Sjaelland wine, dry and mineral-heavy: not as sweet as wines grown further south in Denmark. These casks are toasted French oak, and very expensive. Some Magnus Heinason organic whisky for Faer Isle is maturing in the corner - the big USP with this is that while Faer Isle isn’t making its own whisky yet, they are using Faroe mountain water to dilute this dram. 

Special Casks...

The chestnut casks have gone very well here, Torben says, so expect to see more of them in future Thornaes lineups. Coopered in Alsace, they are mostly used as either a finish, or a pre-maturation. They also re-rack some of the STR casks here into second fill Signatory casks - the results, Torben says, are very bold! 

Danish oak can be quite tannic, Torben claims. Tests on these new casks show similar lactone levels to US oak, in fact. It needs the right kind of new make to work, and he says (with reason, I think) that Thornaes spirit is suitable. It tracks - if they’re making a heavy, creamy spirit, then that will have the potency to match heavy tannin-laden oak, while a lighter spirit would more likely be overwhelmed. The four Danish oak casks I’m looking at here (225L, medium toast, no char) are even more local than you might think - they came from a stand of five oak trees in the forest near Kagerup. 

The Bulgarian oak casks here are 150L, and filled with birch-smoked new make. It sounds gently ironic that Torben says this whisky is an attempt to 'introduce our locality into the whisky'. Of course the oak isn’t local, but he’s referring to the spirit itself here. Birch and alder wood taken from down the road is sent to a maltings, and Thornaes gets back (separate) wood-smoked malt. While tests were done with peated malt back in 2020, Torben found that the wood smoke matched particularly well with the floral quality of the Bulgarian oak.

Thornaes won an award for the best whisky in Denmark with this combo of smoke and Bulgarian oak. The Bulgarian cooperage they use also supplies Suntory, so it’s not a small outfit - keep an eye out for more such casks! You can see slight differences in the shape and bung used, so it does come from a slightly different coopering tradition than France, Scotland, or Spain. 

Voila - a whisky with a local, sustainable touch of smoke, yet aged in a cask from the other side of Europe. Remember, no one would say a Scotch whisky wasn’t local because it aged in casks from Jerez!

The warehouse has open vents at the top - this is done for fire safety reasons under Danish legislation, but it also allows for greater interaction between climate and cask. It doesn’t get that hot in the Thornaes warehouse, but the winters are cold. Some snow blew in and settled on the casks during a snowstorm last winter. This climate interaction is a desired part of the maturation process at Thornaes - Torben wouldn’t mind if they just had a roof and no walls!

First, I got a taste of their first release - a 50L Danish Oak cask which was then re-racked into 200L bourbon. The nose has dry, toasty vermouth notes which carry through well to the palate. Warm, young (3YO), but not spicy, even at 50.9% ABV. To be honest, it tastes 7 or 8 years old at least. I get rich Highland malt vibes akin to a Tomatin or Glen Garioch. Adding water, it becomes a little more syrupy; the herbal notes intensify.

Next, a 100% birch-smoked sample, only four to five months aged and served at cask strength. While that new make spiciness is still present, it’s not too heavy a spirit. The smoke of the wood chips is harder to capture than peat, Torben says. It makes sense - the fuel burns cleaner than peat, so the smoke is less full of smouldering terpenes and phenols that settle on the malt. After longer maturation, this wood-smoked spirit is probably going to end up very subtle, and Torben’s happy with that.

Now, the chestnut casks! Even this young sample at 50% ABV had a strong colour already, and the angels’ share is high on these casks. We’re talking 10% PA for small casks, and more like 3% for the larger casks which arrived in 2022. The nose is milk chocolate, and surprisingly gentle. Again, the flavour stays consistent on the palate, with a touch of oxidation and tannins but still remaining subtle enough. 

I got a preview of an upcoming special release - a collaboration with small Danish producers. 46% ABV, 100% aged in 130L oloroso casks, 4 years old… it comes out silky but not heavy, gently oxidised with those creamy aromas readily evident in the spirit. The sherry notes are clear but still relatively gentle, and all plenty rich even at 46%. It’s supposed to be an easy drinker, so that tracks. Overall, Thornaes releases are supposed to be 48-52% ABV - 46% is the lowest they want to go, making the most of their heavier spirit style.

I also got to taste the ‘big brother’ of an upcoming Bulgarian oak release. 5 years old and 55.2% cask strength, this is a preview of something due for release in autumn 2025. You get those classic European oak notes but also brighter elements - the aromas Torben highlights as floral, integrating well with smoke. This batch is peated (using 35ppm malt, blended down to 20ppm overall), but the smoke is faint and well integrated with the spicy mouthfeel of the Bulgarian oak. 

A new series of Thornaes whiskies will be released later in 2025, moving to 70cl bottles. There will be a mixture of NAS and age-statement bottlings. As Torben says, 'it’s not only about aging - it’s about maturing.' Whiskies like this have to go up against Scottish (or at least many Scotch whisky drinkers’) conceptions of age-based quality.