Mackmyra's vertically built, gravity distillery was among its many innovations.
Update October 16, 2024 – Mackmyra has been rescued from bankruptcy after approval was granted for it to be acquired. The distillery’s new owners are its principal shareholder Lennart Hero and Swedish investment company No. 1 Capital. Hero briefed Swedish newspapers that the business was purchased for just over 100 million krona, which is close to $10 million. The new owners pledged to retain as many of the existing staff as possible and to develop the Mackmyra brand to give it a greater global presence. It also offers fresh hope to Mackmyra’s many private cask holders who, following the bankruptcy, discovered they had only paid for the whisky but not the casks, which were still owned by the bankruptcy estate. Barrel owners were not entitled to remove their casks either, due to Sweden’s alcohol laws. As a long-term backer of Mackmyra, Hero is expected to honor the existing agreements with barrel owners as the distillery gets back to work.
Mackmyra, Sweden’s most high-profile whisky distiller, filed for bankruptcy on August 19th, citing struggles with profitability and cash flow. A publicly-listed company, Mackmyra’s share price had been sliding since mid-2021 and hit an all-time low in April 2024. Over the last year, the newly appointed management board has been unable to find a long-term solution to Mackyra’s financial difficulties and steer the company back to profitability. Ceasing operations during their 25th anniversary year, the ownership and management of Mackmyra Svensk Whisky AB has been placed in the hands of a bankruptcy trustee.
Mackmyra was started by a group of college friends who opened the first Mackmyra Distillery, around 100 miles north of Stockholm, in 1999. It was Sweden’s first whisky distillery. Its inaugural whisky, Preludium 01, was released in 2006. Taking the company public a decade later brought in the capital needed to quadruple production through the construction of a new distillery in 2010 in Mackmyra Whisky Village just outside the city of Gävle on Sweden’s east coast. The innovative, vertically built gravity distillery enabled raw materials to be transported to the top of the building only once, with mashing, fermentation, and distillation taking place as the production process descended floor by floor. Biofuel was used to heat the water, and an on-site converted shipping container was used to smoke malt with peat, juniper, and other botanicals.
Mackmyra’s release schedule was prolific, at times, an overwhelming experience for devotees trying to keep abreast of new expressions once the team hit its creative peak. Nevertheless, Mackmyra was a friendly and accessible distillery, one that earned a dedicated domestic following through its long-running cask ownership program, which attracted groups of friends and whisky clubs to invest in their own barrels. Its whiskies tallied a total of six 90+scores by Whisky Advocate.
Mackmyra’s master blender Angela D’Orazio had an unswerving drive to experiment, becoming the first master blender to use AI to create a whisky. She blended varying cask sizes from full-sized barrels down to fast-maturing 30-liter vessels, becoming a leading exponent of Swedish oak casks, and sampling casks from Mackmyra’s numerous maturation locations including the underground chambers of a former iron ore mine. She blended with imagination and flair, layering on the flavor by using cloudberry wine, birch sap wine, and Japanese green tea to season casks among many other innovations to name but a few. Mackmyra was a place full of promise, and D’Orazio became an internationally recognized figure in world whisky circles and a valued spirits judge. But she left Mackmyra at the end of 2021 to pursue other opportunities.
As the most famous among Swedish distilleries and one of the best-known Nordic whisky distillers overall, Mackmyra’s bankruptcy will send a shiver through the whisky community, which will be particularly felt by newer distilleries established over the past 25 years. While a buyer may emerge to pick up Mackmyra’s brand and remaining assets, any potential acquisition consortium will want to know exactly why it failed. Although the board did not give a list of reasons in their statement, one can imagine the lack of pace of international growth commensurate with their ambition was a factor, as well as changing consumer habits and purchasing channel preferences, a recession in Sweden, the pandemic, Brexit, and the loss of D’Orazio as the creator and trusted public face of the brand. All will have created headwinds for Mackmyra.
It is unknown how administrators will deal with the many anxious Mackmyra cask owners. Bear in mind that it took until 2019 for sales of Mackmyra in the rest of Europe to overtake domestic sales, they seldom used age statements on their labels, the names of bottlings could be difficult to pronounce for non-Swedish speakers, and although they made inroads into many international markets, it never gained the marketing support and distribution to crack the U.S. market.
Mackmyra was started by a passionate group of whisky-loving friends who recognized that if nobody in Sweden was making whisky, then it was up to them to rectify it. Regrettably, that dream is over as Mackmyra’s 25-year run comes to an end. It has failed to align with modern whisky trends, perhaps proving that it never quite developed the corporate chops to make the global jump from cult world whisky to a mainstream whisky brand.
