The bar’s cocktail menu may sound campy, but it’s studded with Icelandic ingredients like lava-filtered vodka, rhubarb liqueur, Birkir and Bjork, local birch elixirs.
In a twist on the old “hair of the dog” adage, Iceland nursed its 2008 financial-crisis hangover with a dose of new distilleries that are finally starting to produce quality spirits. Most can be visited for tastings, each one drawing on a heritage of the island’s environmental purity.
The distilleries are found across the Nordic island but the spirits are available in many of Reykjavik’s bars, where mixologists also are experiencing a golden age that dovetails nicely with Iceland’s homegrown music scene.
Iceland’s whiskey boom began in 2009 when the brothers Egill and Haraldur Thorkelsson founded the Eimverk Distillery in Lyngas, just outside Reykjavik, but they only started selling commercially in 2014. Their pot-distilled Vor Gin is made with 100 percent Icelandic botanicals like angelica root, kale and creeping thyme. Their Floki Whisky has a deep honey finish partly from using locally grown organic barley with low starch due to the northern climate. In 2016, they’re releasing a Sheep Dung Smoked Reserve.
The road to Iceland’s craft liquor revolution was long and dry. Icelanders voted for alcohol prohibition in 1908, and hard spirits remained illegal until 1935. Even sales of full-strength beer were illegal until 1989.
The first few decades after prohibition ended saw few changes. Icelandic cocktails remained uninspired; choices included vodka-spiked beer or cola and Brennivin, an 80-proof schnapps stronger than Jägermeister.
Reyka, Iceland’s first modern distillery, was constructed in 2005 by the Scottish distillers William Grant and Sons. The zero-emission distillery is 45 miles from Reykjavik on the windswept Borgarfjordur peninsula and was the first to filter vodka with lava rocks. Unlike most vodka, Reyka is made with untreated water from the Grabrok spring. Its distiller, Thordur Sigurdsson, is blond, topaz-eyed and the 78th-generation descendant of Borgarfjordur’s eighth-century Viking Egil Skallagrimsson.
“There are a lot of gimmicks in vodka marketing, but the crevices and pores in lava rocks really do filter our vodka, giving it its signature characteristics,” Sigurdsson said while showing me the plant’s Carter Head still. “But our biggest asset is a lack of pollutants. We sent samples of our spring water to the New York lab, and they sent them back asking us to send in untreated water. They’d never seen such clean unfiltered water.”
Reykjavik’s western suburbs are home to Thoran, a startup whiskey distillery that opened in 2012 and is currently seeking investors to buy casks for release in 2018. But in the meantime they’re tinkering with gins and experimenting with sheep dung. With six distilleries in Iceland already making spirits, Thoran’s distiller, Birgir Sigurdsson, predicts the next few years “are going to be the most exciting in Iceland’s craft distilling scene.”
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