Iceland’s Thoran Distillery Now Accepting Pre-Orders

By Richard Thomas

Whiskey-making has spread to many new places around the world, places like Taiwan, Sweden, and Australia. Yet perhaps the most unlikely new entrant into national whiskey-making was the 2009 announcement of the Thoran Distillery project in Iceland. With a population of barely 320,000, the tiny island nation in the confluence of the Atlantic and the Arctic seems an unlikely place for a distillery, given that the domestic market is so small.

That is where Thoran’s unusual approach on the whiskey business figured in. During it’s exploratory phase, the company geared its intent almost entirely around export, and in a novel way. Instead of taking the conventional route of selling a bottled product, Thoran instead advertised that its initial production run would center around entire barrels.

Some other distilleries offer the opportunity to order entire barrels of whiskey on a regular basis (George Dickel comes to mind), but ordering a barrel of whiskey and owning it from the moment it leaves the still is unique. According to Birgir Mar Sigurosson, the company is still collecting funding, but it is far enough along that it began accepting pre-orders on Monday, August 18. Icelandic whiskey is one step closer to becoming a reality.