Ancient Grains, Strange Seasonings: Tales of Whisky Making in Denmark

Twenty years ago, Danish whisky didn’t exist. Lasse Vesterby, co-founder and CEO at Stauning Whisky considered that peculiar. After all, Denmark is similar to Scotland. Both countries have quality grains and water, as well as a similar climate. Thus in the early 2000s, a few Danes took the plunge into whisky making.

As it turned out, there was nothing similar between Danish and scotch whisky. Everything from Denmark’s terroir to the Danish bacteria living on the barley was different. In the last two decades, the two dozen Danish whisky distilleries have emerged to produce flavors, processes, and creative thinking that mark out those differences.

As Lasse Öznek, master distiller at Copenhagen Distillery, says, “We do Danish whisky in Denmark…Why should I copy Scottish whiskies?” Located two miles from Copenhagen’s city center, this eponymously named distillery takes every step of the whisky-making process and reinvents it, from the plate mill used to grind barley to a more uniform size—and the madness that begins post-mash tun. Liquid wort and all—including the grains—get moved to the fermentation tanks, as if he’s making a porridge. “It’s about creating flavor. I don’t care if it takes five more minutes to clean,” Öznek says. “Everyone is always talking about the cask, but if you have new make with all the flavors, then you can do so much more.”

Distilling once, Öznek finishes in a column still and then chooses not to age the resulting whiskey in American oak, as the wide range in Denmark’s daily temperatures would cause him to lose too much whiskey to the wood. So he uses a tighter-grained Hungarian oak instead. “The trees we use are so rare, you can only cut a certain amount a year.”

Opposed to charring, too, Öznek only toasts his casks. In fact, conditioning casks is where he spends most of his time. If he wants an infused cask, he doesn’t buy one: instead, he makes his own rum, gin, aquavit, and a few other spirits to flavor casks for aging whisky. (Those non-whiskies are never sold; just drunk by the team or donated to raise money for a local hospital.)

The process can be difficult and the yields are small. For example, his whiskies made from ancient grains like spelt and emmer required him to sit atop the boiling mash tun to hand-stir this cauldron for six hours because it's too dense for the machine. But Öznek is always driven by flavor and excitement. It’s the same reason he took blood from a deer’s heart, as well as the creature’s spine and ribs, and distilled it with forest herbs, seaweed, and sea salt, honoring Denmark’s hunting tradition. The seasoning process lasted for 18 months. Then it was dumped and in went the organic single malt to age for 3 1/2 years. The resulting whisky is full of umami flavors.

After sampling his near-ready Blood and Bones whisky, Öznek siphoned out still-aging emmer wheat whisky from the only cask he managed to fill. “It’s delicious,” he declared, noting it was probably ready for release but that he and the team just might drink it themselves.

A few hours to the west is Stauning, Denmark’s second-oldest whisky distillery. Like most Danish distillers, Stauning refuses to accept commercial malted barley. Instead, they’ve taken an old, labor-intensive malting process and brought it into the modern era. Traditional floor malting is less efficient, as men with shovels must continuously flip wet barley malting on the floor to prevent germination. Workers walked away with a painful condition known as monkey shoulder. But floor malting is worth it despite the inefficiencies, say its practitioners, who argue that it creates a broader flavor profile. (Others disagree, and indeed it’s a hotly disputed topic in the whisky world.)

Because the team at Stauning are proponents of floor malting and half its founders are engineers, the team invented an 18-foot pin that rolls above the grain malting on the floor. This addition, which has four rows of spiraling shovels, now does the work of the traditional floor maltsters.

“If one or two of us had any knowledge of making whisky, we’d have probably done it like Scotland or Japan,” says Vesterby. “We were blessed with a lack of knowledge, which gave us an open mind.” That open mind has Stauning malting ryes, smoking grains with dried heather, and distilling over direct fire because it elevates and offers new flavors. They even created a filter dram used during the mashing process that allows them to reuse spent grains multiple times.

The whiskies of Stauning have a limited U.S. presence, and they’ve scored well with Whisky Advocate's tasting panel, led by its Stauning Bastard and Stauning Kaos labels, which scored 92 and 91 points respectively.

To the north, on a 1,000-acre family farm with nearly 200 milking cows, Jakob Stjernholm is eighth generation, but only the second to think about making whisky on the family farm. In 2010, one family member produced a handful of experimental casks and that was all. A few years later, Stjernholm and a few members of that eighth generation grabbed the reins of Thy Whisky Distillery and are creating a product that’s utterly Danish.

In Denmark, people heat their homes and smoke their bacon with beechwood. So Thy uses the wood to smoke some of their grains. Instead of sourcing commercial barleys, the team traveled to a Nordic seed bank, received a small handful of seeds to plant in their fields, and have revived lost grains like Langeland barley and a citrusy Imperial, which hasn’t grown on farms for the past 100 years.

Thy grows all of its organic grain, harvests peat out of an on-site lake, and uses water from its estate, making it one of the only single-estate whisky distilleries in the world. “We’re really trying to make it a farm whisky,” says Stjernholm, wanting to honor the land, which has been operating as a farm since the 1300s, and honors his family, who took the farm over in 1773. “It’s like we’re standing on the shoulders of giants.” (Stjernholm is over six and a half feet tall, which would make him a giant standing on a giant.)

Single-distilled, Thy is producing peppery spelt ryes, beechwood-smoked whiskies with that Danish campfire smell, and cask-strength whiskies aged in bourbon barrels. All of it expresses one farm in Denmark.

Across Denmark and in some neighboring European countries, many of the best Danish whiskies are available. At present, Stauning is what most Americans will find in the States wrongly overshadowed by whiskies from the rest of the world.