Thy Whisky

The Free Bacchus Story

Nicolaj Nicolajsen, the seventh generation of his family on the Gyrup estate in Thy, filled the first cask of whisky from the farm's own barley in 2010, working with Thisted Brewery and a malthouse in Germany. Sixteen experimental casks later, the first bottling came out in January 2014. At Christmas 2015 the family sat down to talk about the estate's future, and two couples from the eighth generation, Ellen and Andreas and Marie and Jakob, left Copenhagen to build a distillery at home.

Single estate whisky, where one farm grows the grain and makes the whisky from start to finish, is rare. At Gyrup the grain grows on more than 500 hectares, is malted in three rotating drums the family designed and built, brewed, distilled in a 1,000-litre copper pot still, aged on the farm and bottled there. Most whisky is distilled two or three times; Thy distils once, with a purifier on the still, which the distillery says keeps more of the grain's flavour. Its smoked malt is smoked over beechwood, the Danish way.

Denmark's food authority certifies Thy Whisky organic, and the Danish Agricultural Agency certifies the farm that grows its grain. The family also brought back Imperial, a Danish barley from the early 1800s that had disappeared by the 1920s, from the Nordic gene bank, and grows it again for whisky.

Thy is the house single malt, matured in oloroso, PX and bourbon casks. The new distillery was inaugurated on 15 June 2019, and thirteen people now work on the estate, milking cows as well as making whisky.