tauning Whisky is a Danish distillery on the west coast of Jutland, founded in 2005 by nine friends with no whisky background and now exported around the world. Its tour stands out because Stauning floor-malts all its own grain by hand, distils in direct-fired copper pot stills, and lets visitors taste new make spirit and whisky pulled straight from the cask. On our visit, founder Alex led the tour himself, including a private warehouse bar of experimental casks that are never sold. If you want to see how Danish rye whisky is really made, it’s worth the trip.
Most distillery tours end at a gift shop. The Stauning visit ended with a dram pulled straight from a barrel that will never see a bottle.
That gap tells you everything about what makes Stauning different.
What is Stauning Whisky?
Stauning Whisky is Denmark’s pioneering whisky distillery, founded in 2005 in Skjern on the west coast of Jutland. It floor-malts its own barley and rye, distils in direct-fired copper pot stills, and is best known internationally for its Danish rye whisky. Stauning was named Sustainable Distillery of the Year at the 2023 World Whisky Awards, and its bottlings are now sold around the world.
The story starts in 2005 with nine friends on the West Coast of Denmark: a doctor, a chef, a butcher, a teacher, a helicopter pilot, and four engineers. None of them knew how to make whisky. They had heard a radio programme about Scottish whisky, and one line stuck with them: it’s very easy to make whisky, but difficult to make it well. They looked around and thought, why is nobody doing this in Denmark? The geography is almost identical to Scotland. Stauning sits on the same latitude as Edinburgh. The water is clean, the barley grows nearby. So they decided to try.
They started in a slaughterhouse owned by the butcher of the group. Barley came from a local farmer. The cold store served as the malting floor. The grist went through a meat grinder. Fermentation happened in an old pickling vat. It was, by any reasonable measure, not how you are supposed to start a distillery.
In the fall of 2006, the nine owners met whisky expert Jim Murray and presented their new spirit to him. Murray compared the results to Ardbeg from the 1970s and told them to scale up. That meeting became the moment the founders decided to take it seriously.
In 2018, Stauning opened Denmark’s first purpose-built distillery, a structure with clean angles that nod to Danish design, with burnt timber panelling that mirrors the fisherman’s huts along the coast. The slaughterhouse is long gone. But the philosophy that drove those nine friends in 2005, using what the land around them provides, doing everything by hand, making no compromises on method, has never changed.
Which is why it matters who took us around the distillery. Our guide was Alex, one of those original nine founders. Not a tour guide who learned the history from a briefing document. One of the people who actually built this from nothing.
The floor malting is not a marketing gimmick
Before any whisky exists, there is grain. And at Stauning, in western Jutland, they do something almost no distillery at their scale still bothers with: they floor malt everything themselves.
That means spreading raw barley across wide stone floors, letting it germinate, turning it by hand, and then kilning it. It is slow, labor-intensive, and completely avoidable if you just buy pre-malted grain from a supplier. Most distilleries do exactly that.
Stauning does not.
Walking across the malting floor, the grain under your feet smells green and alive. The temperature is carefully managed, the turning schedule precise. This is not nostalgia for its own sake. The flavor profile you get from floor malting, the control over the exact degree of modification, is something you simply cannot replicate by buying commodity malt. The team knows this, and they make no apologies for the added effort.
Standing next to the stills you can feel the heat
Alex walked us up to the still room, and the first thing that hits you is not the smell or the sound. It is the heat.
The copper pot stills radiate warmth in a way that photographs completely fail to capture. You understand, standing there, that whisky is a physical process. There is fire. There is boiling liquid. There is a machine that has been running for hours before you arrived and will keep running long after you leave.
Alex poured us new make spirit. This is the distillate before it ever touches wood, before years of aging, before anyone has decided what it will become. It is sharp, grainy, and surprisingly complex. You can already taste the character that the floor-malted barley brings to it, a depth that feels earned rather than manufactured.
Tasting new make next to the stills that produced it, with the heat still on your face, is about as close to the source of whisky as you can get.
The warehouse and the room that doesn’t officially exist
Stauning ages their whisky in warehouses with casks stacked high. The humidity is natural. The temperature shifts with the seasons. The spirit sitting in those barrels is doing something slow and irreversible, and the warehouse smells exactly like that process.
Inside one of the warehouses, past the rows of casks, there is a small bar.
It is not on any tour brochure. The bottles behind the counter are not available for purchase. They have never left the distillery, and Alex told us plainly: they never will. Some are experimental batches that went in a direction no one expected. Some are one-off cask fills that simply do not fit any existing product line. A few are things that worked out so well that the team keeps them for exactly this kind of moment.
The room has the quiet energy of a place that exists purely for people who are genuinely interested, not for people who are passing through.
Drinking directly from the cask
The samples Alex poured us that afternoon are not something you can buy your way into.
These were straight from cask, undiluted, pulled with a valinch and poured directly into a glass. The proof varies depending on what the cask has been doing and for how long. Some were young and aggressive. One had been sitting long enough to have developed something genuinely surprising, a softness that did not match its color or its age.
There is a specific kind of honesty to tasting whisky this way. The cask has not been blended or proofed down for consistency. What you taste is exactly what is in that barrel, nothing more.
Alex has the kind of knowledge that only comes from having built the whole thing yourself. He did not explain what the distillery had been thinking when they filled that particular cask. He explained what he had been thinking. It was a conversation, not a presentation. There is a difference, and you feel it immediately.
Why Stauning is worth the travel or try around the world.
Plenty of distilleries offer tours. Most of them are pleasant and forgettable.
What Stauning does differently is let you get close enough to the actual work that you understand something you did not before. The floor malting is real labor, not a heritage talking point. The new make has character you can taste before the oak has had any say. The warehouse holds things that may never exist outside those four walls.
And having one of the founders walk you through all of it, a person who started this whole thing in a slaughterhouse with a meat grinder and a borrowed idea about Scottish whisky, changes what you take away from the visit. The history is not a story they tell about someone else. It is something Alex lived, and it shows in how he talks about every part of the process.
If you care about how whisky is actually made, and not just what it tastes like in a tasting note, it is worth the detour.
Stauning core range: what to buy and what it costs
You do not need to fly to Jutland to drink Stauning. The core range is sold across Europe and beyond, and three bottles tell you most of what the distillery is about: Rye, Kaos and Smoke. All three are floor-malted from local grain and distilled in the 24 direct-fired pot stills, so the house character runs through all of them.
Stauning Rye is the one that built the name. It is the distillery’s signature and its first official release, a rye-led whisky that reads like freshly baked Danish rye bread in a glass. It took World’s Best Single Cask Single Rye at the 2023 World Whisky Awards, the same year Stauning was named Sustainable Distillery of the Year.
Stauning Rye — tasting note
Nose: freshly baked rye bread, wine gums, white pepper
Palate: dried fruit, ripe cherry, peppery oak, vanilla, citrus peel
Finish: long, fruity, peppery ABV: 48% | Grain: floor-malted Danish rye and barley | Cask: new charred American oak | Price: around £59 / €65 (70cl)
Kaos is the everyday all-rounder. It is a triple malt, a vatting of unpeated single malt, malted rye and smoked single malt, part-matured in first-fill Maker’s Mark casks. The smoke is present but folded in rather than dominant, which makes it the easiest of the three to pour for a mixed table.
Stauning Kaos — tasting note
Nose: cereals, chocolate, caramel, cinnamon, bonfire smoke
Palate: nougat, liquorice, sweet apple, oak
Finish: long and smoky, with vanilla, orange and tobacco ABV: 46% triple malt of unpeated single malt, malted rye and smoked single malt | Cask: virgin American oak and first-fill Maker’s Mark | Price: around £66 / €72 (70cl)
Smoke is where Stauning answers Islay on its own terms. The barley is kilned with both peat and heather cut around Ringkøbing Fjord, giving a lighter, more layered smoke than a standard peated malt, then aged five to six years across bourbon, Madeira, Jamaican rum and virgin oak casks.
Stauning Smoke — tasting note
Nose: campfire smoke, smoked heather, white fruit, wildflowers
Palate: biscuits, dark chocolate, nuts, cinder toffee, tobacco
Finish: rye bread, sweet peat, a hint of tropical fruit
ABV: 47% | Grain: floor-malted Jutland barley, kilned with peat and heather | Cask: first-fill bourbon, Madeira, Jamaican rum and virgin American oak, 5 to 6 years | Price: around £75 / €85 (70cl)
How the three compare
| Rye | Kaos | Smoke | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Type | Rye whisky (signature) | Triple malt blend | Peated single malt |
| ABV | 48% | 46% | 47% |
| Grain | Floor-malted rye and barley | Rye plus unpeated and smoked malt | Peat-and-heather smoked barley |
| Cask | New charred American oak | Virgin oak and Maker’s Mark | Bourbon, Madeira, rum, virgin oak |
| Profile | Rye bread, cherry, pepper | Bonfire, chocolate, orange | Campfire smoke, heather, biscuit |
| Price (70cl) | ~£59 / €65 | ~£66 / €72 | ~£75 / €85 |
| Start here if | You want the Danish rye signature | You want smoke and sweetness balanced | You want the smoke up front |
If you are buying one bottle, start with Rye. It is the clearest statement of what Stauning does that no one else does, and it is the cheapest way in. Move to Smoke if you lean peated, and keep Kaos as the bottle you reach for when the table is mixed. All three are stocked by Master of Malt and The Whisky Exchange, both of which ship internationally, and direct from stauningwhisky.com.
Visit Stauning whisky
Location: Stauningvej 38, 6900 Skjern, western Jutland, Denmark
Nearest airport: Billund (approx. 1 hour by car)
Tour length: 90–120 minutes, with or without tasting
Languages: Danish, German, English
What you taste: signature bottlings (Rye, Kaos, Smoke), plus new make and cask samples on guided/special visits
Booking: in advance via stauningwhisky.com (spots fill fast)
For information on tours and visits, check stauningwhisky.com.
/Invited to visit
Frequently asked questions
Can you visit Stauning Whisky?
Yes. Stauning runs guided tours of its distillery in Skjern, western Denmark, lasting 90 to 120 minutes, with or without a tasting. Tours are offered in Danish, German and English. Book in advance through stauningwhisky.com, as slots fill quickly, though walk-in availability is sometimes possible.
Where is Stauning Whisky located?
Stauning Whisky is at Stauningvej 38, 6900 Skjern, on the west coast of Jutland in Denmark. It sits on roughly the same latitude as Edinburgh. The nearest airport is Billund, about an hour away by car; Copenhagen is around a 3.5 to 4 hour drive.
What is Stauning Whisky known for?
Stauning is known for floor-malting all its own barley and rye by hand, distilling in direct-fired copper pot stills, and producing Danish rye whisky that now sells worldwide. It won World’s Best Single Cask Single Rye and Sustainable Distillery of the Year at the 2023 World Whisky Awards.
How much does a Stauning tour cost?
Prices depend on whether you choose a tour with or without tasting, and on special events such as cask-maturation tastings. For current pricing and available dates, book directly through stauningwhisky.com. Gift cards are also available if you want to let the recipient choose their own experience.
What whisky do you taste on the Stauning tour?
Standard tours include the distillery’s signature bottlings such as Rye, Kaos and Smoke. On our visit, founder Alex also poured new make spirit beside the stills and whisky drawn straight from the cask, including experimental fills from a private warehouse bar that are never sold.
Is Stauning Whisky good?
Stauning has earned international recognition, including top honours at the 2023 World Whisky Awards, and its rye is sought after by bartenders worldwide. Whisky writer Jim Murray compared its early spirit to 1970s Ardbeg. It is especially worth seeking out if you like grain-forward, rye-led whisky.
What is Stauning Rye? Stauning Rye is the distillery’s signature bottling and its first official release, a rye-led Danish whisky made from floor-malted local rye and barley and matured in new charred American oak. It is bottled at 48% ABV and won World’s Best Single Cask Single Rye at the 2023 World Whisky Awards.
How much does Stauning whisky cost? The core range runs from around £59 / €65 for Stauning Rye to roughly £75 / €85 for Stauning Smoke, with Kaos in between at about £66 / €72 for a 70cl bottle. Limited single casks and cask-strength editions sit higher. All three core bottles are widely available across Europe.
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