Spirit of Hven

The Free Bacchus Story

Anja and Henric Molin had the idea ten years before they acted on it: that Hven, a small island in the Öresund strait between Sweden and Denmark, had the right conditions for making spirits, with its nutrient-rich soil and mild microclimate. They started distilling there in 2008, in what they describe as one of the world's smallest pot still distilleries, with mashing, fermenting, distilling, cask ageing and bottling all under one roof. The first whisky was released in 2012.

Tycho's Star shows how much of a whisky comes from choices beyond the grain. It is made from three barley malts: an unpeated pale ale malt for the base, a chocolate malt of the kind brewers use for dark beer, and a heavily peated whisky malt that brings the smoke. The casks are specified to two decimal places, 58.20% heavily charred Missouri oak, 33.44% French oak from Allier and 8.36% from Burgundy. The distillery puts between forty and eighty percent of a spirit's final aroma and taste down to the cask.

Kiwa certifies Backafallsbyn AB, the company behind Spirit of Hven, under EU organic rules, and Systembolaget, Sweden's state alcohol retailer, lists Tycho's Star as organic. The distillery's own pages call only its gins organic, so the monopoly listing is the check for any other bottle. It also runs its own laboratory, analysing spirits for distilleries around the world and advising others setting up.

The name is a tribute to Tycho Brahe, the astronomer who worked on Hven in the 1500s, when the island belonged to Denmark, and to the supernova he saw in Cassiopeia in 1572. He called it de nova stella, which gave astronomy the word nova.