The brand: nine Danish friends, one peaty vision
Take four engineers, a teacher, a cook, a butcher, a pilot and a doctor - and you have the founding team of the Danish Stauning distillery. Inspired by a radio report, team member Martin asked himself in 2005 why nobody had produced Danish single malt whisky. That same evening, he and his brother Lasse gathered their friends together. A few weeks later, nine of them decided to put their vision into practice: to make a Danish single malt based on the peaty whisky from the Scottish island of Islay.
The distillery: self-made equipment, small stills and open fire
Although the team members initially had little experience in whisky production, they threw themselves into the adventure: their first distillery was built in the old slaughterhouse of the butcher Mogens in the small town of Stauning. They built a lot of things themselves and used what was available - for example, a former cold storage room as a malting floor. The team moved to a larger farm near Stauning in 2007. Diageo has been involved in the distillery since 2015. This has not changed the way they work: the Stauning team continues to work with equipment that they have partly made themselves, distilling in small stills and over an open fire.
The spirits: four bottlings for a versatile whisky range
"This has potential, it reminds me of Ardbeg from the 1970s," said Jim Murray, industry legend and author of the world-famous Whisky Bible, when he first tried Stauning's New Spirit in 2006. In 2011, the Danes launched their first whisky, their Young Rye. In addition to this and their peaty single malt, the standard range now includes the Traditional, unpeated single malt whisky, and the Kaos, a blend of all three of the above. Stauning Distillers use a variety of different barrels for their whiskies. The Danish spirits mature in ex-bourbon, sherry, port and wine barrels, former rum and cognac barrels or unused American oak barrels, to name just a few. The distillery gets its peat from the nearby Klosterlund Museum.