Region & History

Finnish whisky is a young story that begins with a ban. From June 1, 1919, no alcohol could be produced, transported, or sold in Finland – the country was only the fifth in the world with such a law, following the Russian Empire, Iceland, Norway, and Canada. Those who wanted to drink still found a way: a black market emerged, and with it grew the very crime the state had hoped to prevent.

In 1931, more than 70 percent of Finns voted in a referendum to end Prohibition. On April 5, 1932, at ten in the morning, the first 48 shops of the new state company Oy Alkoholiliike Ab – later simply called Alko – opened their doors. The first price list counted 164 items. To this day, all spirits sales in Finland run through this monopoly, whisky included.

Domestically produced whisky came along much later. The Teerenpeli distillery in Lahti, a family brewery since 1994, began distilling malt whisky in 2002 – the first in Finland to do so. In 2008, Alko put the five-year-old Teerenpeli Single Malt on shelves, the first fully Finnish whisky. Then came 2014, a year in which several new distilleries were founded at once: in Isokyrö, the Kyrö Distillery Company started up its own plant, in Helsinki the Helsinki Distilling Company opened as the city's first distillery in over a hundred years, and at Valamo Monastery in Heinävesi, distillation began.

Kyrö stands for a particularly Finnish founding story. The five founders are said to have had the idea in the sauna, while drinking American rye whiskey together. That's when the question came up: why shouldn't this work with Finnish rye too? They found a disused dairy in the village of Napue, which had most recently been rented out as a garage, and there, starting in 2014, they distilled their first whisky. Today Kyrö exports its malted rye whisky to many countries, from a dairy that once stood full of cars.