"The lighting is low, the walls are dark wood, the back bar glows with premium bottles. You could be in London, New York or Tokyo. But then you notice that very few people are wearing much at all, even though there is snow on the ground outside. That's because around the back of this bar is a fully-functioning sauna. This is the Kyrö Sauna Bar, a pop-up in central Helsinki, now in its second year, and it is exactly what it sounds like."
""If anyone was ever going to build a sauna bar, it was going to be us," says Mikko Kiskinen, one of Kyrö's founders. "For Finns, the sauna is where everything happens. Business deals, friendships, arguments, ideas. It's the most democratic room in the country." The idea that started Kyrö also began in a sauna. In 2012, Kiskinen and a group of friends were sweating it out when one of them brought along a bottle of American rye whiskey."
"Rye is Finland's national grain. It underpins its bread, its farming and its food culture. Yet at the time, no one was making whisky from it. "We had absolutely no idea what we were doing," Kiskinen says, grinning, when talking about those early years. "The learning curve was brutal." Today, that learning has been done. Kyrö is Finland's first and most internationally successful whisky distillery, exporting around 80 percent of its whisky to 35 countries."
Dim lighting, dark wood walls and a glowing back bar conceal a fully functioning sauna at the Kyrö Sauna Bar pop-up in central Helsinki. The bar combines traditional Finnish sauna culture with premium whisky service. The distillery began as an idea during a sauna in 2012 when founders tasted American rye whisky and decided to make Finnish rye whisky. Rye is central to Finnish food and farming, yet had not been used for whisky production locally. The founders faced a steep learning curve. Kyrö now exports about 80 percent of its whisky to 35 countries and is Finland's first internationally successful whisky distillery.
Read at Elite Traveler
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]