High Coast Festival 2025: Two Days in the North with Sweden’s Biggest Whiskymakers

In late June, just after Midsummer, I took the train from Lund up to Kramfors/Nyland for the High Coast distillery festival. Running for a weekend every year, the event parallels my trip last year to Kyrö Distillery in Finland for much the same thing! There were lupins blooming everywhere as I took the bus and then a taxi en route to the event. There are buses running from larger towns, for future reference, just like they were at Kyrö.

The distillery, named for the local area, started back in late 2010. By the way, just to avoid typing the words ‘High Coast’ a hundred times, I’m going to mostly refer to it as ‘HC’ from this point on.

HC is built along the waterfront of a large sea fjord, bringing to mind coastal Scottish distilleries like Laphroaig. Like such namesakes, HC is also purely single-malt focused. It took the founders five years to raise initial funding, helped along by one’s connections to Islay from his time working there. In particular, John McDougall at Laphroaig was contacted as a consultant. Below is their first ever cask of spirit from this time, proudly embossed with a no.1 plaque!

Why ‘BOX’? Don’t worry, all will be revealed…

High Coast (or Höga Kusten) refers to the area’s topography, with hills created by isostatic rebound - the process of land weighed down by glacial ice sheets rebounding over thousands of years. While that’s not a rare phenomenon (almost all of northern Europe experiences it to some degree), this effect is far more pronounced here than anywhere else on Earth! 300 metres of rebound since the last Ice Age has produced distinctive cliffs and made the spot a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It continues to rise at 8mm per year…

The view from across the water in Nyland, where I stayed

PRODUCTION

This main building of the distillery was the Box power plant, named for the former sawmill that stood here. To get a little pretentious for a moment, this distillery is one of those locations where you can really see layers of history stacking up. Each one adds something to make the place unique, and it’s great to see how the distillery is the latest economic activity to grace the High Coast’s shores. 

Why did Box Distillery become HC? In 2017, Compass Box (owned by Bacardi, who also own Dewars) told Box Distillery that there was a trademark issue over their respective names. Supposedly, they overlapped too much - having ‘box’ in the name was apparently too much for consumers to handle? I like Compass Box, but this seems to be a classic case of Scottish legal overreach akin to what happened with Glen Els (now Elsburn).

Two casks showing the shift in names over time…

In the end, it’s for the best. The old name came from the sawmill which the distillery now inhabits. It produced fine-cut planks from local timber, destined for boxmakers in England, hence this little part of the Höga Kusten area becoming known as the Box Peninsula. 800 people used to work here sorting the timber coming down the river. In fact, this was the largest facility of its kind in the world!

The Details

• Unpeated malt (pilsner) sourced from Sweden via Viking Malt
• Peated malt = Scottish Highland peat
• 7 stainless steel washbacks
• 3 day fermentation using dry M1 yeast
• 6400L wash split between 2 wash stills
• Stills run for 5 to 7 hours
• Downward lyne arms
• 2 spirit stills
• Shell and tube condensers
• 300,000 LPA (similar to Glasgow)

The founders were particularly inspired by the stills at Kilchoman, seeing how well they worked for peated and unpeated spirit alike. Kilchoman had only started distilling themselves in 2005, and High Coast’s stills are essentially replicas enlarged by 2%. There’s no automation here - everything in the stillroom is managed by hand, with calculations on paper. 

What I mistook for a purifier atop the wash still is actually just a small cooler which prevents boiling spirit from foaming up the still neck. H.C. don’t employ the anti-foaming ‘soap’ used by many Scotch distilleries to solve this problem. It’s a medium-long neck on the spirit still, helping to add a little extra reflux. The boiling ball keeps the heavily peated Timmer smooth, Tobias tells me. One of five stillmen at HC, he works in the stillroom a few days per month, so I’m lucky to catch him and his impressively red hair. He has valuable experience, having worked for HC since 2011!

On my second day at the festival, I also got to meet Lars Karlsson, High Coast’s exports manager. We go through the stillroom again - I really appreciate how festival-goers get to see the distillery in full operation! In fact, a batch of 105ppm spirit is coming off the stills as we walk by. About 25 minutes into the run, Lars says this is a great time for fruit notes coming through. 

He takes a sample direct from the spirit safe, and I brace for the heat in the sweltering stillroom - you know what I mean if you’ve felt the heat radiating off a working still while standing a few metres away. But in fact, the spirit isn’t just colder for passing through the condensers - it’s freezing cold! 

It tastes fantastic, and Lars explains to me that the cooling water comes straight from the river outside (I know I said it’s the sea, and it is a fjord, but we’re far up enough that it’s fair to call it a ‘river’). Now, at the peak of summer, the water is 17°C - in the winter, it’s only 3°C! They might have the coldest cooling water of any distillery in the world, Lars speculates. 

It stays much colder than Scotland along the Höga Kusten, which makes sense when you learn that the river here freezes over most winters. Like many HC employees, Lars lives over the water in Nyland. In the winter, many of them take a snowmobile straight across the ice rather than drive all the way around. 

Clockwise from top: A switch allowing spirit to be diverted into unpeated and peated streams respectively; A batch of fresh wort; An empty washback with lautering bottom

High Coast’s current production level of 300,000LPA makes it the biggest in Sweden, Lars tells me. In fact, that’s more than the 15 next largest combined! Mackmyra was able to produce more - but does it really count if you’ve shut down production? In fact, HC could in theory produce a lot more - at least, the stills and warehouses could handle it. They would need more washbacks, as they are the current production bottleneck, but there’s no need to produce more at the moment. It’s good to see distilleries being responsible about the future, rather than promising massive unsustainable expansions. If HC wants to double production in future, they are already most of the way there - but for now, being the biggest in Sweden is plenty big enough.

TASTING

Rather than the distillery’s tasting rooms, my tasting experience took place in the largest Festival tents. While other tasting events and themes were taking place over two days across the distillery grounds, this area was always busy with the full HC range available, plus a range of food, beers, and even other stands like SMWS Sweden. 

If you’re in Sweden, check out Magnus and the SMWS!

Their core range consists of four NAS expressions: Älv, Berg, Hav, and Timmer. All these bottles bear a batch number with further information about their production available on the HC website. Over the next five years or so, the goal is to bring the four HC core range bottles up to 70cl size, and to slowly increase the average age of the spirit in each one.

Älv is approximately 6 to 7 years old. A light bourbon-casked dram, it has a little spice courtesy of the spirit’s relative youth. With water added, some interesting bready notes emerge, reminiscent of a classic Scottish Lowland style but retaining that spice. 

Berg is around 7 to 8 years old, and bottled at 50% ABV. It’s aged in sherry (mostly PX) and has won awards, not least the accolade of being High Coast’s most popular whisky *within Sweden*. Rich yet easy-going on the nose, the Berg certainly benefits from that raised ABV. The taste is a little dryer than the PX-heavy maturation might lead you to expect: very nice, but not as fudgey as some others. 

With water added, the Berg becomes sweeter and a little more floral - again, with a touch of spice. The finish leaves you with strawberry jam, but not the full sweetness of it - the aftertaste when you’ve just finished jam on toast and are left with that light astringency in your mouth. I also got a sip of the Berg Cask Strength (58.4%) - a very complex aftertaste reminiscent of an older Clynelish. That dry style of PX is, unsurprisingly, even more apparent here. 

In fact, the Berg was too popular for its own good upon initial release, selling 3x more per month than was expected! HC had to reduce the bottle size and increase the price to try and slow down demand and produce more. They could have stopped altogether, but Lars explains that for domestic distribution with Systembolaget (the Swedish national alcohol monopoly), it’s better to keep selling a few bottles than to have none at all and restart later. Even with their efforts to slow down Berg sales, they had to stop all exports of it until 2024, in order to meet domestic demand.

Hav (how) is bottled at 48% after ageing between 4 and 7 years on new US oak. The new make for this one is very floral, Helena explains, due to the light, floral peat they use. That said, apparently HC uses 45ppm malt from Scotland. Tasting the Hav blind, you might not guess there was new American oak involved, but it adds enough sweetness to balance out the peat. You get that same spice as the Älv and Berg, but now it lingers for longer, lightly smouldering with the added smoke.

Timmer is High Coast’s full-peated expression, bottled at 48%. It’s truly a Scottish peat reek, you wouldn’t mistake it for anything else. That said, it’s not too obviously an Islay style of peat. Adding water only seems to amplify the smoke somehow!

For further unique bottlings, SAS have a HC whisky for sale onboard their planes, and there are also some exclusive bottlings on sale at Arlanda Airport. The nearest Systembolaget in Kramfors (kram-forsh) also has unique HC bottlings. Speaking of my trip the previous day in Lund, Helena recommends the same Agitator Swedish blend that I just bought: a good sign!

While talking to Helena, I get a pour of something special from another ambassador in the tasting tent. It has a fresh nose, almost sweet and fried. Like Riesling and a Krispy Kreme - a tasting note which I felt very pleased with inventing on the spot. The perfumey sweet nose only intensified further after tasting and returning to it. This turned out to be a 12 year old HC dram at 50% ABV. Incredibly sweet and rich, it combined a light and fruity new make with really quality bourbon casks to make something absolutely SMWS-worthy. It’s like they took the regular Älv and expanded its flavours out in every direction! I apologise for not writing down your name, whoever it was that gave me this dram. I remember your face and generosity, if that helps!

Next, I try the previous year’s festival bottling, the 2024. 10 years old, aged in new and used US oak and bottled at 50.3%, it’s even sweeter and more floral, but less intense. More obvious ex-bourbon notes come forward, as if these casks released a few liters of that sweet corn spirit from the devil’s share. With water, it might be even better.

This year’s Festival bottling - tried it, but can’t find my notes!

Across all these drams, I had plenty of time to triangulate the HC flavour profile. Overall, nothing would be out of place in a lineup of Scotch whiskies, though it’s important to say that is also a mark of quality. Most HC drams have quite a spicy, rough edge, whether they’re younger or older, lighter or heavier. Even their ‘heavy’ drams aren’t really dark or rich as that might imply. It’s really that spicy malt note which seems consistent to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if the short fermentation, slightly faster distillation, and coastal environment all played a part there. You could compare this to Wolfburn, Kingsbarns, Ben Nevis, or even Glen Ord.

While the core range is very straightforward, High Coast’s extended range is both logical and a bit much at the same time. Their Silent Mills bottlings are all variations on the basic Timmer formula; Harbours bottles come from the Hav; Mountains give the regular Berg a twist. 

One more thing I was curious to see up here were drams aged in Quercus Mongolica  - I’ve never seen this oak used at any other distillery! Though literally ‘Mongolian Oak’, it is widely found across Japan, China, Korea, Mongolia, and Siberia. Indeed, mizunara is actually a specific variety of oak within Japan, not just *the* Japanese oak, as is often implied. This oak is much easier to find there - indeed, that’s likely why less fuss has been made about it compared to its fancy, headline-grabbing cousin.

The bottling above was approximately 9 years old, and aged fully in these casks. While there was something a little different about the dram, I couldn’t pull out anything super unique, at least not after having tried several regular expressions from HC. Maybe it was a little more floral and sweet? Don’t get me wrong, it was very good! A sweet bready note on the finish like an iced bun, and overall reminiscent of a really good quality US oak cask. It just might not be something sufficiently unique to pursue further in future. 

Now… now we come to a bottling that really excites me! The Swedish Oak Solera, bottled at 52.5%. The nose is immediately dry and toasty! Candy and nougat, but not so light as sugared almonds… Some Swedish oak casks are also used for the Hav, apparently. When I ask what distinct flavours Swedish oak lends to a whisky (something I always want to pin down with local materials), the employee suggests nutmeg. 

For once, this ‘solera’ expression does what it says on the tin! Whereas Glenfiddich 15 comes from a regularly topped-off 38,000L vat, that’s not a solera; not a succession of casks which whisky descends through as it ages. At HC, they do it right, using a stack of 7 casks. New make goes into the top criadera, formed of ex-bourbon casks which I observe are first-fill Maker’s Mark. Around 70L is moved down through each layer, finally reaching the base solera composed of twenty Swedish oak casks. These all held spirit for one year before the upper layers were added, and they now run a new batch in/out of this system every 18 months or so. 

The Swedish Oak Solera has many of the Hav’s same measured sherry notes, only richer - and yes, with a note of nutmeg! It had floral hints of coriander, which together with the nutmeg makes it more distinct that the classic ‘christmas cake’ and allspice notes of many sherry casks. Not the same as the juniper notes I was expecting from my experience with Mackmyra. If this has some PX casks involved, then you’d really lift those chocolate-raisin notes to the level of Christmas cake. Take note for the future - PX and Swedish oak should be a winning combination…

The ambassador talking me through the bottle also suggests clove as a tasting note, but in a wonderfully revealing cultural moment, he has to find the English word. ‘The things you put in oranges at Christmas’, he says. Isn’t that great? Beyond the simple tasting note of ‘clove’, it adds the exact context he is recalling when he tastes High Coast’s Swedish oak drams. Finally, I note that adding water doesn’t spoil this dram, but it also does nothing to improve it. Leave it as is - the High Coast Swedish Solera is a triumph!

WAREHOUSE

After looking at the solera, we should probably see what else is in the warehouses! The four warehouses here experience seasonal temperature swings of 50 degrees plus. Casks ranging from 40L to 500L are stored across multiple warehouses, each nearly 2000m2.

I had been told there were some triangular casks in use at HC, but here I’m informed it’s Gammelstilla Distillery who does that. Still don’t see any evidence of that online, but I’ll keep an ear out for anyone who might inform me otherwise…

What HC does have are square casks! Or rectangular / cubiform ones, however you say it. Point is, they started as a wee joke based on the old Box name. Roger, the distillery manager, asked a cooper if he could buy 100 square-faced, 63L casks, like boxes, as a joke… but then they arrived! There’s a full account of the story here at Whisky Advocate. I suppose I got the visitor-centre version, with the comedy dialled up a little, but it’s still good fun, and the casks really are in use! 

Why do the square ‘box’ casks hold the small, oddly specific amount of 63 litres? Its no random amount. While looking at GPS during construction, distillery founder Roger realised their new warehouses were going to cut right across the exact line of 63°N! They painted it on the warehouse floors so you can see it clearly for yourself.

Inspired by this discovery, they  bought in some 63ppm malt, commissioned these 63L casks - did I mention the cooper was born in 1963? They made a 63 hectolitre batch, and aged it in casks stacked 63 decimetres up for 63 months (so 6.3m up for just over five years). It was then bottled at 63% ABV, though some went into PX for a 630 day finish… and supposedly, the results were all spectacular. Even if they weren’t, what a commitment to the bit! It’s lucky for HC that they aren’t any further north, as getting much above 63% ABV would be tricky…

All bottling takes place on site, and every H.C. bottling is over 46%. If you’re going to be a more specialist whisky than mass-market Jamesons or Glenfiddich, this is a good move. You’re going to be charging more per bottle anyway, so you might as well deliver that bit of extra flavour and richness from a slightly increased ABV! 

This also has other benefits, Lars explains. For example, their PX-aged whiskies can very easily turn cloudy at lower temperatures, and raising the ABV helps that. H.C. continues this traditionalist approach (as far as Scottish traditions go) by avoiding chill filtration and E150 colouring, though both are perfectly permissible in Swedish/EU whisky making. 

To reflect the growth of the distillery, HC recently added a visitor’s center, built on the foundations of an old barracks (though that’s been gone since 1891). Visitors are already coming from all over Sweden but also internationally, and HC sells a lot of private casks to the same people.

Selling this type of cask is not unusual, but they seem particularly successful and numerous at HC. So far, over 11,000 have been sold! They’re good for the young distillery’s cash flow of course, Lars says, but he also points out their true value. Folk with private casks become impromptu ambassadors; everyone thinks their cask is the best, and proudly says as much to others! 

Quite a few of these customer casks are Swedish oak, but apparently the Solera is the only official HC release which uses it significantly. Lars believes the spice notes of Swedish oak are great for blending with other casks, but he’s less convinced about their value for full maturation. The clove notes can become overpowering, especially when paired with other tannin-heavy quercus robur like Hungarian and French oak. 

That means the distinctive HC spice I’ve been tasting (for two days at this point) comes from elsewhere, and Lars puts it down to the lower ABV at which HC fills their casks. Rather than 63.5% (as is common across Scotland), they do 60% for large casks and 56% for any cask smaller than 100L. Besides spice, this apparently develops more fruit tones in HC whiskies, according to Lars.

LAST IMPRESSIONS

HC is following the changing markets of the 2020s. Before Covid, they used to sell about 60% of their whisky internationally, and the rest in Sweden. Now, Lars tells me, the opposite is true, though international sales are steadily increasing. Their best markets are in Asia, which is a story you hear from many distilleries nowadays (not least from Spirit of Hven, my previous distillery visit just before this one).

I need to thank Helena, Lars, and Tobias at the distillery for their time during my two-day visit to the festival. It was a very in-depth exploration of the distillery, its history, all with a lot of tasting! There were shades of Scotland with the landscape, waterside buildings and black/white sign (above). I also need to thank Linus Håkansson, who saw my posts about the visit online and helped show me more drams and corners of the distillery. Thank you very much for that!