Back in June, I was lucky enough to get a day en route to a distillery - in fact, to my second distillery of the day. Having just visited Thornaes in the morning, I then got a series of trains, ferries, and even a trolleybus to Ven (‘veen’), a small island in the Øresund. This was my first time visiting a Swedish distillery - in fact, my first time visiting Sweden at all! It was encouraging to see ads for the distillery even on the ferry over from Landskrona…
You can see as you approach the island that, a little like Port Askaig, the port is down a steep incline from the rest of the island. Echoes of Islay…
The island of Ven has about 400 inhabitants but gets 200,000 visitors every summer. Hven is the older Swedish spelling. Signs of the island’s claim to fame - being the site of astronomer Tycho Brahe’s Uraniborg (the first custom built observatory in Europe) - are everywhere.
Transferring to a final bus, I got to Spirit of Hven. This distillery is one of the longer-established in Europe - not so early as Mackmyra, but still older than most! Anja and Hendrik Molin’s hotel and restaurant came first, before distilling started back in 2008 (with head distiller Johannes and one room). They have accommodation for 140+ people here, but it's the whisky we’re looking for!
Spotted on the way in… €268, if you need the conversion
That’s the first impression I (and doubtless many others) had of Hven - their conical flask style bottles. A gimmick? Possibly - but their spirit is certainly far more than that. After all, you don’t work for 15 years to produce a wax-sealed single malt as a gimmick! Starting with the initial ingredients, there’s the question of what Hven uses to make their whisky, with the first signs visible on the other side of the road as soon as I got off the bus.
Rye fields ideal for Gladiator (2000) fans
One key starting point for understanding Hven is their use of many different grains - this is *not* just a single malt distillery. While the number of organic products in the Hven lineup has changed over time, they do place a lot of emphasis on locally grown grain. Their malt is organic, and sourced from the mainland, but rye and corn come from the island. My suspicions about the grain field over the road are confirmed: this is all rye for the distillery. The rye grown here is a distinct local variety which, Henrik claims, is particularly full-bodied and laden with menthol notes; less bitter than some US varieties.
Might not be a farmer, but even I can tell that’s wheat
Oats from the island have also been distilled, so like Thornaes, there’s some oat whisky on the way. “Tastes so much better than oat milk”, Hendrik says. Hendrik has experimented with growing grain in different fields/soil types, and found this changed the flavour of the final product more than which grain was used!
Distillation Details
- Production = 50% wheat, 25% malt, 15% rye, 105 corn
- 3 sparges, multiple yeasts - 1 week ferment
- 1500L mash each day
- Wash still reduces batch to 500L ; Spirit still to 200L for one cask
- 100% manual distillation
- Stills run slower to capture small heart cut
- C. 12,000 barrels aging on site at present (approx. 1,000 in main building)
- Angels share approx. 2-3%
These stills produce Hven’s malt, with straight sides and a relatively tall, straight neck. The lyne arms angle upward slightly, but these are still suited to capturing plenty of richer, heavier compounds. These stills also perform stripping runs for the corn and rye whiskies, but those then go off to a truly one-of-a-kind still - a wooden Coffey still, reconstructed on site using Aeneas Coffey’s original blueprints! This is the first such still built in over 100 years, while a handful are still in operation around Caribbean rum distilleries.
Hven have been making rye whisky for about six years now, and it’s a 100% rye mashbill. The grain ferments unfiltered before the wash distillation run in those pot stills mentioned above (and that’s grain-in distillation, by the way, more like what we’ve seen at Cley and a few others). It then gets its 2nd run through this Coffey still; the corn is a similar process.
Hven normally extracts the finished spirit after it passes through 13(-ish) plates of filtering on the still’s 2nd column. Apparently, this still needs constant adjustment in ways that took the Hven team some time to learn. It’s not all bad - this still does give them a lot of control, and it's the most efficient in the whole distillery - but the whole system must be continually balanced using a labyrinth of steam pipes.
And it all goes into this worm tub at the end, which I love - the modern stainless steel leading into a rustic copper coil in a barrel, just as it would have been in the nineteenth century. ‘Grain whisky’ production, but with a worm coil to beef up the final character! For all this effort, they get about one barrel of spirit per hour - a lot more than the pot stills can give. There are plans to modify this Coffey still with an integrated mash column, mimicking innovations from Cameron Bridge in the 1880s.
While I’ve only mentioned malt, corn, and rye so far, about 50% of Hven’s total spirit production actually comes from wheat. A minority of this grain (12%) comes from the island itself, while the rest comes in from the mainland. Some of it goes into their blended whisky, Old Hare (see below), but most goes to producing base spirit in their gins, vodkas, and aquavits. In fact, these constitute 80% of everything Hven produces!
Much of it goes to China and Taiwan, while botanicals like bitter orange arrive from Cairo. Hven already exports to 30 countries across the world, with products as diverse as coffee-infused, oak-aged vodka and rum. That last one is almost a side project, with about 40 barrels per year mostly going to clients in France.
Note the retort in the middle
You’re probably already getting the big picture - Hven is a complex and technical setup! The place might as well be one big chemistry lab, bubbling with a hundred different liquids. Add in contract distilling and testing they perform for other companies, and you can see why Hven leans into the laboratory aesthetic with their little bottles! Despite their smaller stature in whisky markets / on shelves, Hven is truly a cornerstone of the whisky world: they simply do much of this work behind the scenes.
A proverbial half of Scotland’s whisky gets tested here, besides much of Sweden’s alcohol industry and many products from China and Japan. When he started this distillery, Hendrik was one of the few people new distilleries could call to consult (beside the more famous Scots like Jim McEwan and Jim Swan). Since at least 2010, Hendrik has been well connected to the other Swedish whisky leaders, particularly Mackmyra and Smögen.
A fun experiment, similar to Hudson in the US: testing how music affects maturation
My head reels as Hendrik tells me about the 300 varieties of oak used here, adding fascinating details gleaned from his years of studying chemical components and aroma compounds. Mushroom and floral tomato notes can come from quercus robur, he says; liquorice and herbal spice from French quercus petraea; chocolate, vanilla, and fudge from quercus alba. I make the mistake of saying ‘white oak’ then, and he corrects me: there are about 50 kinds of ‘white oak’, alba is only one of them! Burr oak apparently introduces gazpacho-esque notes, swamp oak dark, musty cellar aromas… the list goes on!
He generously lets me taste a malt sample which spent one year on ex-cabernet quercus petraea and twelve years on Missouri chinkapin oak! No other words for it - this was spellbinding, amazing, a mindblowing wall of flavour. The warehouses here have temperature and humidity control, intended to keep the angels’ share in a perfectly standard 2-3% PA range. Like so many distilleries I see for EuroWhisky, Spirit of Hven are generally trying to accumulate stock. They have to make efforts to maximise space here; bottling takes place on the mainland.
This Missouri cask is no one-off - it’s a foundation of Hven’s whole whisky line-up. About 60% of Hven’s casks come from one source, McGinnis in Cuba MO. Not only is it great to have such a specific cask source, but Hven chose this lot for the very specific oak they can source. Chinkapin oak and its strong hazelnut tones are something to look for in all Hven whiskies as a result.
They elect for deep toast and heavy char to reduce acidic notes and ramp up the chocolate. Hendrik doesn’t use many sherry butts, finding them a bit hard to work with, but what there is to be had is roughly an even split between oloroso and PX. A small line of vin santo casks completes the lineup as I move on from the warehouse.
TASTING
I then got to taste a whole host of Hven whiskies in the bar, with help from Hendrik and his son, the bar manager, Charlie. The bad news - almost none of the photos I took of these bottles survived. The phone I use for this sadly does this sometimes - but all my notes are intact!
The Old Hare is a rare but interesting move from Hven - a wholly in-house blended whisky, bottled at 40,4% ABV. ‘I wanted to do the Famous Grouse, but good’, Hendrik jokes. The name comes from back when the king of Sweden imported German hares to Hven for hunting when he couldn’t travel to Germany himself. This is a blend which deliberately avoids the classic pinch of peat added to characteristic Scotch blends.
To me, Old Hare has that thin edge of wheat whisky, sweet and sharp, before you find that underlying corn that’s quite young. They age it in old exhausted casks to deliberately add a few bitter notes to the sweetness of the corn. The sweet initial sip fades to a slightly bitter aftertaste in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Haig Club.
Thankfully, that’s where the comparison ends. The edge of rye in here adds a note of sugared almond, and these spirits were all married in Rioja gran reserva casks. As Hendrik says this, I can pull out the polyphenol notes of grape skin from the mix. This slight bitterness almost does for this blend what smoke does in Scotland - it stops sweet, light grain whisky from becoming overly saccharine and simplistic. Hendrik even adds a touch of PX in here, just to round out the sweet side. All this, and in Sweden this whisky is actually *just* a bit cheaper than Famous Grouse! Most of it is sold in Asia, and I certainly hadn’t seen it myself in any European whisky shop.
MerCurious (46.5%) is Hven’s corn whisky. The mashbill is 88% corn with a touch of malt, rye, and wheat. Considering the production/ageing process too, Hendrik points out this would qualify as bourbon if it was made in the US. Hven also adds additional enzymes for the fermentation, which is perfectly allowed in Sweden. You can really smell the bourbon DNA on the nose, and the palate hits you with a welcome wave of Chinkapin. Some floral and familiar mineral notes emerge too. With a drop of water, notes of mint, biscuit, and kardemummabuller.
The type of corn matters too - 90% of what they use is feed corn (the standard kind, as it were) while 10% is sweetcorn. The latter is less efficient - despite tasting sweeter, it actually has a lower alcohol yield. However, it adds more flavour and creates more variety for local wildlife. It also means some of this island-grown corn can be picked by visitors and used in the restaurant!
Hendrik tried using blue and red corn varieties here apparently, but agricultural challenges aside, the distinct flavor of these varieties apparently didn’t come through well in the final spirit. This *has* worked well in other places, so it's not something to ignore if you see elsewhere, e.g., Balcones Baby Blue, Jimmy Red [corn] bourbon, or especially Sierra Norte.
The rye whisky, Hvenus (an astronomical pun I only just got while writing this), came from Hendrik ‘falling in love with rye whisky’ while exploring the heritage of cocktails in the US. The nose is lighter and softer than the corn whisky, yet also with many familiar American rye notes and a distinct depth. Overall, I’d say it’s more balanced and smooth on the finish.
Hven launched their signature single malt, Tycho’s Star, in 2016. Initially a five year old expression, it has worked up over time to a nine year old: the aim is to reach 10 years soon. Accounting for the nature of minimum age statements, Hendrik notes that the existing Tycho’s Star bottlings already have some malt as old as 14 years in them!
The malt used for Tycho’s Star includes 5% chocolate malt, and 20% comes from the Malterie du Chateau in Belgium, who we’ve seen before at EuroWhisky. Most of the malt used at Hven is actually an IPA malt, and Chateau is one of the few maltings capable of producing organic peated malt at 40ppm.
The nose of Tycho’s Star certainly gives you some smoke at first, and dark woody notes. After fermenting with M strain yeast for 24 hours, Hven adds a champagne yeast to add more banana and pineapple notes. Hendrik claims that yeast alone creates about 10% of all their flavour compounds. 58% of the casks used to age Tycho’s Star are Hven’s signature chinkapin, with the remainder coming from French robur and petraea. The latter comes from the Allier town of Moulins, adding sweetness and pepper.
Hendrik recounts how his initial 15 barrel batch of the Star was, apparently, not very good! He started adding more malt, tweaking the recipe and aging each time, until he thought they hit the right note after 40 more barrels. He had wanted to bottle at 42% as a reference to The Hitchiker’s Guide…, and he is happy to note they still produce Tycho’s Star in 42-barrel batches. Systembolaget apparently had an issue with 42% ABV, so Hven downshifted to 41.8%, in the process matching the island’s telephone code.
It has a very light body to it, and is much smoother than I expected. The Star lets you sit with the smoky aftertaste clearly as everything else falls away. The peat used to make this does include Islay peat, but that’s only a small fraction. More smoke comes from Swedish peat (from Smögen, reportedly a light flavour), old oak casks, and island seaweed!
Then we try The Nose, referring to Brahe’s most distinctive physical feature. A 12 barrel batch, this is bottled at 44.9% ABV and partly smoked using juniper wood. The youngest component spirit is 10 years old, and the result is quite a sweet smelling single malt. Some Italian sweet wine casks were included here. The whole thing has a smell of older peat and bitterness - I wouldn’t have guessed juniper was used here. I don’t know that it's more complex than Tycho’s Star, but it works well.
Seven Angels (49.6%) has a great, sweet finish that rolls onward like a wave. St Barachiel includes oloroso, PX, cabernet sauvignon, and chinkapin casks: only 1800 bottles exist. Their first whisky, Urania, was released back in 2012, and Hven initially did annual releases until 2019. For seven years, these releases became the seven stars range, representing the Big Dipper. Hven produced the first ever Swedish blended malt, Bländande. Just two single malts together, it uses some very heavily peated malt sourced from Hven and another, unnamed producer. At 55.5%, it has a rich mouthfeel and dryness which absolutely resembles something from Islay.
With all the whiskies tasted, I finished off my visit by asking Hendrik about the Spirit of Hven ‘style’. He believes that the unique signature of these whiskies is that air-dried Missouri chinkapin. It always constitutes 40-60% of the casks used in their whiskies, providing sweetness without bitterness. Hven also dilutes a little more before aging to help their spirit extract more sugars from the oak.
That hazelnut and chocolate character… that’s the only common denominator between all their whiskies. There is no ‘Swedish’ style of whisky - indeed, Nordic whisky collaborations have been more influential than domestic partners. Hven, like many other Nordic distilleries, are interested in developing a Nordic Whisky G.I. label. Sweden has around 35 whisky distilleries overall, but only 15-ish are true commercial outfits. It’s not on track to be the most prolific country in European whisky, but it was one of the first - and Hven are quietly underpinning half the whisky world with their testing work!
All that was left was a walk back to the ferry past the Tycho Brahe museum - if it wasn’t the end of the day, I might have stayed a little longer! thanks to Anja, Hendrik, Charlie, and everyone else who made my visit work that day!
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