On 17th August, I went to Kyrö Distillery’s annual summer festival, Kyröfest. A combined whisky event and local music festival, I quickly learned that they don’t skimp on that second part! It’s clearly a very popular event in this part of Finland (Ostrobothnia), and the buses we took from nearby Seinäjoki were plenty full.
Half-way between Helsinki and Lapland, Kyrö Distillery is located so far north that it is now the furthest north I have ever been, by quite some way. Just past the peak of the Finnish summer, it was a comfortable 19-21C.
The distillery grounds are transformed for the festival, with plenty of stands for food and drink, cocktails, non-alcoholic options, and two music stages. I can particularly recommend the bifanas! The space was busy, but well-balanced - the only issue I could see was a lack of seating, but it's a festival, so I get it.
You definitely get to be in the distillery, not next to it - you can sit beneath the grain silos, and see the architectural features of the main building. It used to be a dairy - the Isokyrö dairy works - but production stopped here in 2008. After being used for a time to store some cars being imported from the US, it thankfully became what it is today in about 2015.
We had a tour around the distillery from one of the five founders who got hooked on rye, Miika Lipiäinen. First, we see the old stills, mostly of German origin, including the oldest - a gin still in the corner, a tiny pot with an attached column. The second phase of the distillery’s growth saw larger pot stills with very dramatic fluted tops and thin lyne arms.
Kyrö uses local yeasts, storing and researching them carefully, but their yeast bank also includes Scottish M3 and some US samples. Their rye comes from the local area, and is all malted before a six-day ferment. Kyrö practises double distillation, producing 29% ABV low wines in the first step.
'It's all about the impurities you want to keep', Miika says as we walk through the newest and largest stillhouse. At maximum capacity, Kyrö produces about 50 barrels per week, equating to about 325,000LPA. Despite all this success and expansion, Kyrö are only now in 2024 reaching the point where whisky and gin are providing roughly equal parts of their income.
The new stills come from Speyside copperworks, and absolutely look like typical Scottish pots. Holding 9,000L and 6,000L, they have big fat necks with just a little pinch in the side, with dead-horizontal lyne arms running into shell and tube condensers.
However, Kyrö employs no filtering or lautering in their production process, so the full rye grains all go into the still with the wort. Rye, Miika explains, doesn’t have the distinct, strong husks of barley, so it doesn’t self-filter the same way. The distillery needs especially strong pumps to shove the thick rye wort through its pipes. Kyrö aren’t secretive about details of their production process. Their first cut (from heads to hearts) happens at 79%, then the second cut (from hearts to tails) at 60%.
As I walked around the distillery, I had already noticed some sea buckthorn trees. Talking about the distillery’s gin (which is perhaps what most Finns know it for), Miika explains that Finland has the legal right to pick wild fruit and to roam, as you may have heard of in Sweden or Norway. Kyro made use of this when developing their gin, picking wild fruits like sea buckthorn growing in the Napue area. The founders spent 2013 to 2015 developing the botanics of their gin, which is actually sold as Napue Gin within Finland (and as Kyro Gin everywhere else). Alongside 12 dry botanicals, Kyro uses 4 fresh, local ones: Meadowsweet, birch leaves, sea buckthorn, and cranberry.
We got to see an old storage room within the old dairy building, now used for some of Kyrö’s older barrels and cask owners. I spy a massive sherry cask in one corner. The air is moist and cool, and Miika points out that this is no accident. As the dairy was built before modern refrigeration was available, the Isokyro dairy workers used to cut ice from the river and haul it into this space. The room’s slanted walls would keep all the ice blocks touching as it melted over the summer.
Miika pointed us to a tiny old bottling machine, which he remembers fondly (and somewhat ruefully) using to produce the first 200,000 bottles of Kyrö. There was no labelling machine - they just built a rough wooden jig and lined them up by eye. I’m sure the novelty wore off very quickly!
In Finland, the whisky producer is implicitly trusted by the government, as historically the government was the sole producer and it hasn’t done much to update its own rules in the modern day. At the same time, alcohol advertising is severely restricted in Finland, and spirits are expensive products only available at government monopoly shops. Miika contrasts all this to Germany, where buying alcohol is cheaper and easier, but distillers are very closely monitored at every step.
In their latest stage of expansion, Kyrö wants to go all-renewable. Only 1km away, a biogas company takes their spent grain and food waste. Now, the whole distillery runs on biogas, and many local cars have also been converted to run on this power source.
Kyrö’s new warehouse won design awards in 2022 for the design of a concrete building. Kyrö wanted wooden construction to blend in with the local forest, but they and the Finnish government were wary of the fire risk this presented. Instead of settling for plain concrete panels, Kyrö found an innovative way to give the concrete a wood pattern, helping it to blend in while still remaining fireproof. Now, this is the largest whisky warehouse anywhere in the Nordics, though High Coast apparently has something comparable.
Inside, I see SMWS casks and towering rows of barrels. The building is internally divided into 5 segments, each capable of holding 200,000L of ageing whisky. Fire laws dictate much of this design, and there are other rules: the space needs to be air-conditioned, with fans providing airflow, 70% relative humidity, and a strict temperature range of 7-23C.
One of the workers told me in perfect Finnish deadpan that 'we are in a very hot climate here'. Kyrö have tried to impress on the regulators that Kentucky bourbon casks get much hotter than 23C and don’t spontaneously combust, but as of yet, this plea has fallen on deaf ears. We were lucky enough to get a quick look from high up, climbing the stairs to the top row of casks!
Kyröfest Distillery Tasting
Though a little late arriving from our tour, me and Laura still thankfully got to taste six excellent, rare Kyrö whiskies. All were cask strength, and held up to having plenty of water added. The whiskies were presented by master distiller Kalle Valkonen, another of the five founders.
He started by explaining some of the general ethos behind how Kyrö ages their whiskies, which mostly focuses on new American oak. The newest set of stills started running in 2020, and their increased copper contact has apparently created a more fruity kind of rye spirit. That means less need to beat the punchy rye into shape with powerful new oak, so Kyrö can start to be more flexible with their choice of casks. Apparently the American oak casks are actually providing more sweetness on their second use, and now Kyrö has been around enough to start using some as third fills.
First, a 4 year old version of their Wood Smoke aged in STR red wine casks (55%). These casks are apparently used as part of their regular Wood Smoke bottlings, but now we got to try it on its own. Kalle notes that there had been worries that their new Peat Smoke batches would be too strong, with lingering flavours in the stills bleeding into the Wood Smoke. It took a while to get the peat smoke sorted for that reason!
The STR cask tones down the wood smoke, with menthol and gummy bear notes standing out. The smoke fades into the warm background of the whisky’s finish. The nose smells like lingonberry juice, which I only tried for the first time a few days before this visit!
Secondly, a 4 year-old finished in Monbazillac, an intensely sweet dessert wine from France comparable to Sauternes. Kyrö only has 10 of these casks so far, but more are apparently on the way. Also around 55% ABV, this whisky has a very sweet nose and a beautiful body, with the rye only coming through at the end. You really get to see the strength of Kyrö’s underlying rye malt character in a tasting like this, and this Monbazillac was probably my favourite of the six we tried. I highly recommend the experience!
Whisky no. 3 was aged first in ex-bourbon and then Jamaican rum cask. Yeasty, oily, sweet - the strong rye flavours still hold up against the rich rum. No. 4 was also aged in ex-bourbon, but this time finished in Madeira. Distilled in 2018 and bottled at 52.9%, this is comparatively old for Kyrö. I taste maple syrup, raisins, amaretto, and a drying quality like a dark sherry. The smell is incredible - like a pan of dark sugar melting in front of you.
No. 5 raised the stakes - a 7 year old first-fill bourbon cask at 56.7%. The nose has a lovely vanilla sweetness, but that rye finish comes roaring through regardless. After adding water, this tastes surprisingly similar to the rum cask. Finally, whisky no. 6 came from a 130L oloroso cask. The contents were distilled back in 2017, and at some point they were moved to a little 60L cask and left in a forgotten corner of a Kyrö warehouse. No-one had tasted it for years until it was re-discovered and bottled! A beautiful vanilla-sherry smell emerges from the glass, and the finish carries that sherry for a long time. Sweeter than most oloroso casks, this dram is almost strawberry-like, reminding me of some lighter kinds of Glenfarclas.
Kyröfest Distillery Tasting
After the tour, tasting, and some dinner, all that was left to do was see the rest of the festival. I wasn’t visiting for the music, but I have to say I did still enjoy the range on offer. It certainly made the day into more of a spectacle than some whisky festivals and open days can be.
We also took a walk out of the distillery to see the surroundings. The river runs right next to Kyrö, and we had two main sights to see. First, a monument just down the road for the 1714 Battle of Napue. This was a big deal in Finnish history. The final battle of the Great Northern War, it saw Finnish troops (of the then-Swedish Empire) defeated by Russia.
Not only is this an important site for Finnish history, but if you take a look at the memorial, you might recognise something…
This was the source of Kyrö’s font for all their bottles and marketing. You can also see a stylised reference to the monument on the top of each Kyrö bottle cork.
After that, we went to take in the sunset around the river, crossing the Perttilä Suspension Bridge. It’s the oldest working suspension bridge in Finland, and the old-fashioned wooden bridge deck certainly feels out of time.
Kyrö makes some great whisky, and I enjoy it even more now that I’ve seen where it comes from, seen the landscape, and got a taste of Finland. It’s been a mainstay of EuroWhisky tastings since the beginning, and I just need to thank a few of the staff for arranging our tour and tasting. Miko, Dominic, Ella - thanks!
Might have also taken the chance to recreate an old childhood photo too...
PS. Helsinki airport - Duty Free
On the way out of Finland, I thought I would take a quick overview of the Finnish whiskies available at Helsinki Airport. If you’re travelling through there, here’s what you can expect!
Kyrö has a healthy stand, naturally, and they recently added to this with a special experiential display! Helsinki Distilling Company also has a good stand, including these fetching red cases. Besides all the gin and other products, there is also Teerenpeli single malts. Besides the new eco-friendly (lighter) bottles of regular expressions like Portti, they also have airport exclusives like the Länki.
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