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A wild idea becomes reality
Perhaps it sounds too simple, but it all started with a skiing trip. Eight of us, friends since our student days in the early 1990s at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, met up at a mountain lodge in the spring of 1998. As we had each taken along a bottle of malt whisky for the host, the topic of conversation was obvious. How do you actually make whisky? And why isn’t there a Swedish one?
The idea might well have gone no further and simply been forgotten. But we were too curious for that. We started to dig up information, went on study trips to various whisky distilleries and turned our dreams into actual plans. If there wasn’t a Swedish whisky, why couldn’t we create one?
A company is born
One year after the idea was born, in 1999, Mackmyra Svensk Whisky was founded. Later that year all the permits were in place and the first drops could be distilled. In 2001 we had produced two recipes, an elegant, fruity one and one with characteristic Swedish smokiness. These are the two flavours that will be associated with the words Swedish malt whisky.
What had started as a mental exercise developed into a dream, which in time became a reality. Now the very first, totally Swedish malt whisky is here. When the first bottles went on sale in the stores of Systembolaget [the State-owned alcohol monopoly] in March 2006, people were standing in line and the bottles were sold out all over Sweden in one hour.
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Six of the eight founders, celebrating the first copper still
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