Kyrö Finnish Whiskey & Gin

In Finland, all the best ideas are born in the sauna. 

And of out of the hot atmosphere of the sauna came the idea for the Kyrö distillery.

In 2012, 5 young Finns were in the sauna, wondering why, in such a rye-obessed nation as Finland, nobody had started a rye-whiskey distillery. They realised it was too good an idea to be left for someone else to come along first. So they decided to found their own distillery, and didn't waste a minute in going about it.

The location for the new distillery came naturally to them – the town of Isonkyrö, and the beautiful buildings where the country's most famous cheese had been produced until a couple of years before. The facility is located in Isokyrö, near the city that gave its name to the first Kyrö gin, the Napue Gin. Two years after the cheese factory closed, the distillers went through many bureaucratic hurdles, as well as the renovation of the building. 

In 2014, the five Finns from the sauna – Miika, Mikko, Miko, Jouni and Kalle – heated the stills for the first time.

In the “all-rye” distillery, only rye is used to produce high-quality gins and whiskeys.

This explains the company motto: “In rye we trust”. Using rye doesn't make the distillation easier since it is one of the most difficult grains to ferment and distill. In order to earn the name whiskey, a spirit has to spend at least 3 years ageing in barrels, so the first Kyrö whiskey will be avilable in 2017. In the meantime, we can already enjoy the unaged rye spirit, aptly named Juuri, meaning 'root'; and the lightly aged rye named Verso, Finnish for 'Sprout'.

The area around the distillery is not without history. The battle of Storkyro took place nearby in 1714. This was the last battle of the Great Northern War at the Finnish border, and ended with the decimation of the Finnish force at the hands of the invading Russian Imperial army, numbering twice as many troops, and the 7 year occupation of the whole of Finland. Nowadays the area is a much more peaceful place of dairy farming and natural beauty. And, of course rye distilling.

The outstandingly elegant and refined design of the Kyrö distillery's products was carefully conceived to reflect the gin and whiskey's local roots and identity. The typeface used for all the distillery's labels was inspired by the font carved into the stone of a 1920 memorial, commorating the battle of Storkyro. Some of the botanicals used for the gin are foraged from the former battlefield.

The Kyrö distillery is the northernmost gin and whiskey distillery in the world.