The Gyrup family estate is the home of our distillery, our own organic farm, our family and our lives. We grow all the grains used in the making of our whiskies. In our malthouse, we have enough room to make organic malt for a number of other Danish and international breweries and distilleries.

Our distillery is located in Thy in the north-western corner of Denmark. Thy is where our hearts are. It is the place we get our inspiration and it is where we seized the opportunity to create one of the very few single estate whisky distilleries in the world - where we have full control over every step of production from field to bottle. 

Thy is surrounded by water and breathtaking nature. With windswept coasts and sand dunes along the North Sea and behind them the heath, lakes, plantations and forests with their flocks of bellowing stags. To the east, the landscape is covered by grain fields all the way down to the Limfjord, where you can gather oysters and mussels - and catch lobster.

The salty westerly winds and the powerful contrasts in the landscape runs thick in the blood of all who hail from Thy. In these inspiring surroundings, we make both single malt whisky - some with a smouldering smokiness and others of a more soft and sweet character - and rye whisky with spiced floral aromas that remind us of the surrounding heather heath in full bloom.

The type of grain you use in your whisky plays an important role. We believe that the variety, the soil and the year it was harvested influences the taste of the whisky.

We grow both modern and heritage grain varieties in our fields, because we can taste the difference.

Consider, for instance, the barley variety Imperial. It was cultivated in Denmark in the early 1800s. In the 1920s, it disappeared, replaced by higher yield varieties.

We've reintroduced this grain variety in our fields after a century in hibernation in a deep freezer at the Nordic gene bank. Imperial is ideal for organic farming and produces a distinctive, flavourful whisky with fresh green and citrus aromas, which you won't find with modern barley varieties. 

Every single kernel used in our whisky is germinated in our three malting drums which we designed and built ourselves. During germination, we gently roll the 6 tonnes of barley in each drum, while the natural enzymes in the grain to build up and convert the starches in the grain into fermentable sugars.

During the nine-day malting process - using just grain and clean water - we create most of the aromatic compounds that characterise our organic new make.

In our mash tun, we brew 1,000 litres of 'wort' per batch with 8-9% alcohol content in each brew.

The process starts by crushing 240 kg of the selected malt into a 'coarse flour' and mixing it with 740 litres of hot water so we end up with a temperature of about 65°C. After stirring for 45 minutes, the malt enzymes have broken down the starches into fermentable sugars (maltose), which are dissolved in the water along with many of the aromas from the grain.

The sugary wort is then drained from the remaining husks, cooled and transferred to a fermentation tank. We sparge with more hot water to extract as much sugar and flavour as possible from the grain. The whole process takes 3-4 hours for each brew.

When the fully fermented wort is brought to the boil in our 1,000 liter copper still, relatively more alcohol than water evaporates. When those vapours are re-condensed in the condenser, we end up with a distillate with a high alcohol content.

Our distillation process is unconventional in that we create our finished new make in just a single distillation - as opposed to the usual two or three distillations. We use an extra condenser (purifier), which condenses some water vapours and the heavy oils in the process and sends them back into the pot.

Each cask in our warehouse is the result of a selected combination of grains, malt types, fermentation and distillation processes as well as cask type, size and maturation time. And yet we find the recognisable character of Thy Whisky in every drop.

When we judge that one or more casks are about ready for bottling, it's time to create the finished whisky. We try to blend the whisky from different casks (vatting) and at different alcohol strengths, and decide from this whether the whisky should be bottled as a single cask or as a larger bottling.

We bottle all our whiskies as limited bottlings, respecting the particular qualities of each cask - with a preference for alcohol strengths above 47% and sometimes at cask strength.