Advent Calendar 2023: Day 9

The participants in the calendar include those who are just starting their whisky journey and those who have been enthusiasts for a while. I dare to say that, regardless of the length of their hobby, tonight's whisky has sparked diverse opinions in our chat. Before delving into the details of today's whisky, let's briefly go through the history of Kyrö Distillery.

Kyrö Distillery's story begins on an evening when five friends sat on a sauna passing around a bottle of rye whisky. Amidst the session somebody asked, "Why doesn't anyone in Finland make rye whisky?" There are few options what was the whisky enjoeyd that night, but that is irrelevant to this story. What matters for us is that the idea of a Finnish rye distillery wasn't left as a lost memory on the sauna benches; it was actually set into motion. The rest, as they say, is history.

Kyrö Distillery is located in an old cooperative dairy in Isokyrö. The first distillations were made in 2014, and the resulting spirit was smuggled to the London Whisky Show and offered to several master distillers, needless to say the feedback was positive. Whisky wise there was a little setback as the distillery's gin Napue was chosen as the best gin in the Gin & Tonic category in 2015. After this, production focused on gin for a while. Fortunately for us, there's now plenty of whisky in the warehouse, and the core range has expanded to four whiskies: Kyrö Malt, Kyrö Wood Smoke, Kyrö Peat Smoke, and the travel retail bottling Kyrö Malt Oloroso.

However, tonight's whisky is not part of the aforementioned quartet but one of the 95 bottles that came from a cask in which I had my first cask ownership. Cask number 4398 was filled on October 20, 2018, in Isokyrö. After a little over four years of maturation, it was time to name and then bottle the whisky. The bottling strength was decided to be 56.5% and it was named "May contain whisky and stories".