00:04
Alex Højrup Munch
I have chosen the building of the National Gallery of Denmark.

00:08
Alex Højrup Munch
The front of the building is Italian Renaissance style, very classic, very beautiful. The new extension in 1998 by the architects Anna Maria Indrio and Mads Møller from C.F. Møller was very exciting and totally new. In between the white, new modern architecture and the red, yellow, old Italian style building, you have this glass pathway that divides the new and the old.

00:35
Alex Højrup Munch
I moved in 1997 from the old world of Aalborg and my past to the new world, the vibrant city of Copenhagen. I had actually been for a short period of time been a bike messenger. So I had been driving past the National Gallery, watching the progress of the building.

00:52
Alex Højrup Munch
The extension was quite a discussion in Denmark at that time. Some really hated it. It was quite new to build something so different, so modern on something so old and so traditional. It was a shock to many people. But I loved it and I still do.

01:09
Alex Højrup Munch
It takes my breath away when I go through the entrance to that new building. This has been a big part of my life, looking at traditions versus the new. It's symbolic.

01:28
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My name is Tina Jøhnk Christensen, and I'm the host of Danish Originals, a podcast series created in partnership with the American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark and the National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who have made a significant mark in the US.

01:45
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today, our guest is Alex Højrup Munch, a Danish whisky maker and businessman. Welcome, Alex.

01:52
Alex Højrup Munch
Thank you very much, Tina.

01:55
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
We are talking from a distance. I'm in Los Angeles and you are not. Where are you at the moment?

02:01
Alex Højrup Munch
At the moment, I am in my house in Silkeborg in the central part of Jutland.

02:07
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It looks nice. You've got a painting behind you. It looks comfortable where you are.

02:12
Alex Højrup Munch
Thank you, and it is.

02:14
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How close are you to where you are making the whisky that is called Stauning? And would you mind describing the area where you're making the whisky, so that the listeners get an idea of that part of Denmark?

02:28
Alex Højrup Munch
Certainly. So I live approximately 100 kilometers from the distillery. The distillery of Stauning is situated on the west coast of Denmark near Ringkøbing fjord, and it's just outside the small village of Stauning. Typically, when you make whisky, you name it after the city or the area you come from. And that we also did with our whisky, Stauning Whisky.

02:53
Alex Højrup Munch
The area is, you can imagine, flat. The west coast in Denmark is super flat and very different to where I live, where it's the most hilly area in Denmark, Silkeborg. So, it's contrasts.

03:06
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
We also have a former Prime Minister called Stauning. He was leading the country for quite a long time. Is the name a little bit after him or is it just the town?

03:16
Alex Højrup Munch
It is actually just the town. But we have a whisky that's basically named after Thorvald Stauning, which is called KAOS. Back in the 1930s, Thorvald Stauning got elected as Prime Minister in Denmark and he had an election quote. That quote was "Choose Stauning Or Get Chaos." And then naturally we had to have a KAOS whisky.

03:41
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
True. Not because he created chaos, but because he avoided it.

03:45
Alex Højrup Munch
Exactly.

03:47
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I'll go back to the town and where and when it all began. But I would like to focus a little bit on the US. You have been doing promotional work here, and one time was when you did an event with the Oscar-winning film by Thomas Vinterberg named Druk, or Another Round, as it's called in English.

04:06
Alex Højrup Munch
So it was together with a whisky club in New York. It's the fastest growing whisky club in the world. It's called Drammers. I had a promotional tour to the US and the founder saw that on Facebook. And he said, oh, Alex — and I've met him a couple of times before — why don't you come, I'll invite my friends, you can have a whisky tasting, and let's watch some Danish movies.

04:29
Alex Højrup Munch
Which movie would you like to show? And thought, well, Druk had just won the Oscars. So we invited about 20 people, had a great evening. I think, though, people were a little bit surprised about the movie. Another Round is not that fun. It's a very deep movie. The Americans were, I think, looking to get a fun evening with a lot of whisky and beer, but it was actually the opposite. So it was actually quite quiet after we had shown that movie. There were a lot of reflections going on with people.

05:00
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What do you think Another Round says about the drinking culture in Denmark? And what kinds of talks did you have with the American audience after the screening where you served your whisky?

05:12
Alex Højrup Munch
I think a lot of people know that we have quite an open drinking culture in Denmark. We are, I wouldn't say famous, for drinking, but even at a very young age, we start drinking alcohol. So there were a lot of questions about youth drinking in Denmark and if what they saw in that movie was actually how things were happening in Denmark.

05:33
Alex Højrup Munch
And I had to say yes, that is very typical for Danish culture that we start up drinking at a very early age, or openly at a very early age. Because when you then start digging into American culture, it seems they also start off drinking earlier than they'd say they do. So a lot of people will be drinking in secret, rather than openly like we do in Denmark. There is definitely a difference.

05:57
Alex Højrup Munch
And we have to remember this was a whisky club, so they probably drink more than other people. It kind of felt liberating for them that the Danes were kind of some of the most happy people in the world. And maybe it was part of that drinking culture, that we are not so restrained in how we act when we are drinking and being together.

06:16
Alex Højrup Munch
That evening was fun. People were happy. We talked a lot about the word hygge being part of Danish culture and also drinking. Even though it's a whisky club, these people are also very aware of drinking too much, about the problems alcohol can do in families and in culture.

06:36
Alex Højrup Munch
And I think that's very typical for whisky clubs, that people are aware of the bad things about drinking. Often we use the sentence "drink responsibly," and I see that more and more in whisky societies and whisky clubs. It's not just about drinking a lot of alcohol, but it's drinking the good stuff, and actually noticing the flavors and enjoying the alcohol together with friends, not just alone.

06:59
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What is the reaction to your product, a Danish whisky, in the US?

07:06
Alex Højrup Munch
It has actually been very fun to bring a Danish whisky to the US. Back in 2005, we wanted to make a Scotch-style single malt whisky. But over time, we actually found that it was more interesting to do a rye whisky, so a whisky based on rye. In Denmark, nobody knows about rye whisky, but it was actually the first whisky made in the US before bourbon whisky.

07:31
Alex Højrup Munch
So way, way, way back, immigrants brought rye from Norway, Sweden, Denmark. They brought rye to the US because it's a grain that will grow very easily in bad soil also. So it's a safe bet when you went to the US to use rye. And that's why it became the first whisky of the US because everywhere you have starch, you'll make alcohol. Even George Washington had a rye whisky distillery in his backyard.

07:57
Alex Højrup Munch
So, in the US, when we brought our rye whisky, people recognized it. But the cool part of this is we bring the old school tradition of making whisky. Europe is old school, it's traditional, it's royal, there's a lot of history. And Denmark, the kingdom of Denmark.

08:17
Alex Højrup Munch
We are actually making our own version of rye. And we all know that rye is a huge part of Danish culture. So that combination of a rye whisky, which is in the US usually seen as a rough kind of strong alcohol, only something you use in a cocktail, suddenly became lifted up to be premium alcohol. It was actually accepted quite quickly that this is a refined rye coming to the US.

08:41
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Did you go to the whisky areas or the bourbon areas like Kentucky and New Orleans, for instance, and to present it there? And how did they react to it? Were they pessimistic or were they positive when they saw the Stauning bottles?

08:55
Alex Højrup Munch
Very positive. And I think that's also very typical for American culture. People are very open, very energetic. They want to try new things. They want to start new businesses. Entrepreneurial. Doing something new for them is very cool. On the contrary, when we brought it to Scotland, people were like, oh, whisky from Denmark? whisky is from Scotland. But in the US, they embraced it.

09:17
Alex Højrup Munch
Actually, my first trip with the whisky to the US was to Kentucky, to a big trade show. And I remember when I arrived in Louisville, Kentucky, in the airport, I had several samples in my bag. And the man in customs said, do you need to bring something in? I said, yes, I've brought some Danish whisky. And I had actually brought too much, more than it's legal to take into the US.

09:41
Alex Højrup Munch
And I'm a very honest person. So I said to him, I've brought this and I've brought this many bottles. And he looked at me and said, Danish whisky? Wow! I've never heard about that before. That is super interesting. Go straight in.

09:56
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Okay!

09:57
Alex Højrup Munch
So I did not have to pay any extra for customs or anything. That shows American culture.

10:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah, that's interesting. You worked with the famous restaurant Noma in Copenhagen, and I assume you are in touch with several Danish and Scandinavian restaurants in the US too. Is that the case?

10:12
Alex Højrup Munch
Yes. So one of the first things we did when we came to the US was actually find ambassadors to bring our whisky forward. It's easier said than done, I would say, the alcohol system in the US is a very difficult system to work with.

10:29
Alex Højrup Munch
It's not as if you get your product into the US, you will be able to sell it the next day. Takes a long time. But the first restaurant we went to was Aska in New York, which is a Swedish / Scandinavian restaurant. And we did a big launch at Aska where we paired our whisky with Nordic food. So this is a Michelin restaurant.

10:50
Alex Højrup Munch
They have a Swedish chef and we invited the media — the spirits media and the more consumer-based media. I think we were 15 people and we had a dinner, four, five hour-dinner with 13 courses, something like that, and paired our whisky with the food. It was a very, very good evening.

11:09
Alex Højrup Munch
And it worked very well, Nordic Danish whisky with Nordic food traditions. And for several years, Nordic food has really been going forward in the world, also in the US. So it's perceived as premium, high-end when you combine Nordic food with a whisky like ours. I think that was positive.

11:27
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yes, that is positive. You mentioned the enthusiastic reaction of the customs officer in Kentucky, but he didn't taste it. What is the initial reaction when Americans taste your whisky?

11:42
Alex Højrup Munch
The first reaction is that they get very surprised because when they taste a rye whisky, they expect something to be very spicy, peppery in flavor or strong high alcohol, something you wouldn't like to drink neat, but would prefer it to be mixed into a cocktail. That's the typical reaction when you talk rye whisky.

12:05
Alex Højrup Munch
Our whisky has been made the way you produce a single malt whisky, and that creates a more subtle, sweet, easy neat drinking type of whisky. So that's the first reaction. It's, wow, I didn't expect this, this goes really well neat, I don't have to mix this into something.

12:22
Alex Højrup Munch
The next reaction is that they really taste the rye, so the flavors of the whisky and the sweetness of the whisky. We have been part of several competitions and tasting notes. We've won several awards in the US. For instance, I think we are the highest scored non-US whisky in Wine Enthusiast, which is pretty incredible. 97 points.

12:43
Alex Højrup Munch
That created a lot of attention in the US, actually, also in Canada. We just got approached by a Canadian importer. He said, I read this profile of your whisky and award. Wow, that's amazing. So, it's a high-end, premium type of whisky that you can sit and enjoy neat, which is not very typical with a rye whisky in the US.

13:01
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What makes it particularly Danish?

13:05
Alex Højrup Munch
Number one. It's the use of rye as a Danish grain. As I often explain to people when I have my tastings or promotions in the US, I say rye is a huge part of Danish culture. If you were to open the lunchbox of my two sons when they go to school, you will see rye bread in the lunchbox.

13:23
Alex Højrup Munch
It's been here for centuries. Actually, some believe that the Vikings, when they first entered into the Northeast American coast, they actually brought rye into the US as the first rye that came to the US.

13:38
Alex Højrup Munch
So that's one point. Number two is that it's a different approach to how you make rye whisky. When you talk to, for instance, Noma or Geranium, they talk a lot about local produce. The grain is within 25 kilometers of the distillery. The water is local. Everything we do is local. So that's very important for us. And the flavors of that whisky then reflects the area where we come from. That approach is not a very typical approach.

14:10
Alex Højrup Munch
It's very Danish that we use what we have nearby. It's a small culture. We need to help each other. It's very important, especially in the outskirts of Denmark, the west coast. It is important that we assist each other, help each other, and support each other. We could have done it at a lower price if we were to buy the grain from the middle part of Denmark, for instance. So you get the flavors from the west coast.

14:32
Alex Højrup Munch
And again we did this double distillation, the way you make Scotch or European whiskies is the way we make this rye whisky. So that's also why it differs so much from the American way of making rye whisky.

14:45
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Did you go to whisky tastings in the US, research and talk to whisky producers?

14:52
Alex Højrup Munch
A lot. One of the cool things about the US is that even if I come as a competitor, basically, call them up and say, hi, can I come visit your distillery? They say yes with open arms, they embrace you, they talk to you, they tell you everything they know because they also know you can't copy their product. And if you want to copy it, you can try, but you probably won't make it. So why don't you just share the information? I think that's really, really cool.

15:21
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What do the tariffs that have recently been added do to you as someone who sells their product in the US?

15:31
Alex Højrup Munch
Well, it could mean a lot. I think over the last six to ten years, what we call new world whisky has grown a lot and we are part of what we would call new world whisky. So new world whisky is not Scotland, not Ireland, not the US, not Japan, but the rest of the world.

15:52
Alex Højrup Munch
And as Americans are very curious, they've actually taken a lot of that new world whisky to the US and tried it on, which has been very positive over the last six to ten years. But what will happen now is probably that they will lose all of that amazing whisky coming into the US because the price is going to be too high.

16:13
Alex Højrup Munch
It could also be that the whisky still will come to the US, but the price at the retailer will be too high versus the American whiskies in the US. So you will probably see European whiskies collect dust at shelves in the US or not come to the US, going forward.

16:29
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And from a business perspective, that's not very great for you.

16:35
Alex Højrup Munch
I would say strategy-wise, we are waiting at the moment to see what is going to happen. Fortunately, two years ago, we sent a lot of whisky to the US because we thought let's just get a lot of inventory to the US instead of just sending it every second month because that's very expensive.

16:54
Alex Højrup Munch
So we sent over what is probably the next two years' allocation of whisky to the US. So for us, the next one and a half to two years, it won't matter that much with the tariffs. I hope that someday they will realize this is probably a bad idea to put tariffs on these whiskies, and then we can start exporting into the US.

17:16
Alex Højrup Munch
On the other hand, what is happening right now is the European Union is putting tariffs on American whiskies to balance it out, which is also terrible because now we won't get all that great American whisky to Denmark, into Europe. But what we see in Denmark right now is actually the importers are looking to buy our whisky instead of the American whiskies, 'cause we do an American style whisky, rye whisky.

17:38
Alex Højrup Munch
So for us, it could be very positive that the importers in Europe are now starting to look for something different to the American rye whiskies or bourbon whiskies.

17:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Let's talk about some very positive things now. You have won a lot of prizes for your whisky. Which one of these prizes stand out for you?

17:57
Alex Højrup Munch
Ooh. There's probably three prizes, if I can pick more than one. The one prize that's very important for me is back in 2013, we won "World's Best New Make." So New Make is what comes directly from the pot still. It's not what has been in the cask, so it's not ready to drink, it's not matured, but it's the base for a whisky. And if you are able to create the world's best base for a whisky, then you're doing pretty well. So that was a big one for Stauning Whisky to win that award back in 2013.

18:37
Alex Højrup Munch
The next one was double, because this year we won "World's Best Single Cask Single Rye," which is very important for us because we look to sell a lot of rye whisky in the US, and of course in other markets. So by winning that award, it's an approval of the quality of our whisky. Now people can actually go buy it because they know it's top tier. This is some of the best out there.

19:03
Alex Højrup Munch
And the third one is actually not the whisky. It's the distillery. In 2020, we won, actually, by Statens Kunstfond an architectural award. And we won with our new distillery that was finished in 2018. So for the other founders of the distillery, but personally for me and my good friend Morten, and Morten is the architect of the distillery, we were extremely happy.

19:29
Alex Højrup Munch
I remember when we got the news about that award, I texted Morten and I said, Morten, I don't know this award, is it a good award? And Morten was just like, yes, this is amazing! And I'm so proud of winning this award because it lifts it up as art. So we have a beautiful sign on the wall at the distillery. And the architectural firm LOOP has the counterpart of this prize at the firm in Århus. So a really, really good win, that one.

19:59
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Do you have a big fan base, a fan club of some sort, maybe?

20:04
Alex Højrup Munch
Yes, we do. There's an official fan base called Stauning Whisky Society, which you can find on Facebook, of course. But besides that, there's a lot of followers around the world, whisky clubs, people just fascinated by Stauning. I think the second largest is probably in Germany. There's a lot of Germans coming to the west coast in Denmark for holiday. And a lot of these people, they come again and again and again and again every year.

20:32
Alex Højrup Munch
It's quite amazing actually. And they, every year, come back to Stauning Whisky to buy another bottle of whisky, or two or three or ten whiskies. So yes, slowly we are growing our fan base around the world. We are now in Asia, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and then most of Europe and the US, Canada. As a founder, it's just amazing to see that people keep on following you and keep on buying your products.

20:57
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And for the listeners who don't know the Danish west coast, it's famous for its beautiful, long, broad beaches and its fantastic and quite energetic ocean, whereas a lot of the other beaches in Denmark are more quiet, but this is rough.

21:15
Alex Højrup Munch
Yeah, you're right. I think we take it for granted, the west coast. And perhaps I shouldn't say this, but often I feel it's a little bit boring. It's so flat, there's no mountains. But when I get people from all around the world, they're baffled about it, of this flat, windy, beautiful west coast, the sea, and the sand dunes. And that's really when you start to again appreciate the territory, the area, the nature of the west coast, when you have guests coming there.

21:46
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You can watch a movie called Land of Mine, which is shot there, by the way, if you are American and you want to explore. I was just thinking that. Your education has nothing to do with whisky, does it? What would you be doing if you had not created Stauning with your friends? Talk about your education and what you initially intended to do with your career.

22:09
Alex Højrup Munch
So way, way back, I actually wanted to be a carpenter. Yes. I liked using my hands. This was when I was very young. And maybe fortunately or unfortunately, I don't know, my dad, a math teacher, was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, you shouldn't be a carpenter. You should use your head with math, you should study engineering.

22:32
Alex Højrup Munch
And I remember I was like, engineering, oh, that sounds so boring. I'm born and raised in Aalborg, up north in Denmark. And he said, no, no, no, you should move to Århus. Your uncle lives in Århus, you should help him in his garden, make some money, then study engineering in Århus. And I'm like, no way I'm going to study engineering, that's for sure.

22:52
Alex Højrup Munch
I wanted to do something totally different. I moved to Copenhagen. I wanted to get away from dark Jutland and go to modern Copenhagen. So I moved to Copenhagen and I started a construction course, a pre-study before becoming an architect. I started studying architecture for six months, where I actually also met my wife.

23:15
Alex Højrup Munch
And during that time, you had to go and do some work, some real work. You couldn't just be studying, you had to get to know the world of architecture and engineering, construction work. When they were building, in Copenhagen, it was called Nykredit, the new, beautiful building just opposite the black diamond in Copenhagen, this Henning Larsen construction or building. It's really, really beautiful. I worked there for six months.

23:41
Alex Højrup Munch
And my boss, he was an engineer and he said to me, Alex, you do not want to be an architect. That's a waste of your talents. You should become an engineer. You will get much more money by studying engineering and getting work within engineering. So a young man, 19, 20 years old, I'm like, hmm, more money, sounds like a great idea.

24:04
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Your dad should have said that.

24:06
Alex Højrup Munch
Yeah, my dad probably should have said that. I went back to my girlfriend, we were living in Copenhagen, and I said to her, I think I'm going to study engineering instead of architecture. And my wife said, oh, it sounds like a great idea. I'm going to start studying architecture in Århus.

24:26
Alex Højrup Munch
So I said, why Århus? You can study architecture in Copenhagen. And she said, yeah, yeah, but I want to do something different. So we ended up moving to Århus, where I did work for my uncle in his garden during those two and a half years. And I studied engineering. So my dad got it all right —

24:46
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Eventually.

24:49
Alex Højrup Munch
Yeah. I got my first work just outside Århus in a small company that did fasteners, facades, glasswork, stuff like that. And after I think six months, I went to my boss and I said, I quit because this was not what I imagined an engineer would be doing. And my boss, and we are good friends this day, he said to me, but you can't quit. Usually, people don't quit, they get fired in my company.

25:20
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Oh, he was offended.

25:23
Alex Højrup Munch
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I said, I don't like what I'm doing. And he said, what would you then like to do? I said, okay, now we're talking. So I started going into a bit of more creative work, sales, and marketing within the company because I found out I perhaps had a talent for sales and marketing during my first half year in that company.

25:45
Alex Højrup Munch
And I basically stayed there for ten years. I had a small trip to New Zealand and Australia with my wife for six to seven months, came back and started working, continued to work. And during the last years we started Stauning Whisky. I think it was in 2005, we got the first ideas to Stauning Whisky.

26:03
Alex Højrup Munch
Very tiny, not anything serious. And then it grew. It grew and grew. And then one day, I quit my job. And he said, what are you going to do? I'm going to live by making whisky. And he said, that's okay. If you give me a bottle, it's okay. So I gave him a bottle of whisky.

26:21
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You'd given him ten more years and now he was no longer offended. So that's good. And you were nine people, right? Talk about how it started.

26:29
Alex Højrup Munch
Exactly. Martin Vesterby got the first thought about making whisky in Denmark. He was in his car on his way to a summer house in Langeland, just south of Funen. And every year, he would go with his family, and I would go with some other guys, together with that family. I'd been studying engineering with Martin's younger brother, Lasse, and Lasse and I are the two persons that run Stauning Whisky today.

26:57
Alex Højrup Munch
That year we couldn't participate. But Martin went, and on the way there, he heard this radio program about whisky. And in their program they said it's easy to make whisky, but it's difficult to make a good whisky. And Martin is a very entrepreneurial guy. So he went to the summer house, and he said to the family, I've heard it's easy to make whisky — not the part about, it's difficult to make a good whisky — should we try?

27:23
Alex Højrup Munch
But Martin, we don't know anything about whisky. That's why I think we should make a list of friends we could invite into this project and maybe one of these friends would know something about whisky. Luckily, I and some other guys that had been studying engineering were written down on that list.

27:41
Alex Højrup Munch
And I remember Lasse, the younger brother, he called me up, I was standing in my kitchen in Silkeborg, and he said, Alex, we've been discussing if it is possible to make whisky in Denmark. Would you like to be part of that project?

27:55
Alex Højrup Munch
And actually, I think it was two or three days before, my wife said to me, Alex, you need to get a hobby. You're gaining a little bit of fat, something is growing on your stomach. You need to get a hobby. I don't imagine it was making whisky, it was probably something about playing football or handball or tennis or something like that. And I said, okay, I'll think about it.

28:16
Alex Højrup Munch
Shortly after I said to my wife, I've got a hobby, it's making whisky. It was maybe not her idea of the best hobby, but she could see the energy, the fire, the will to start up something. So she luckily said yes.

28:30
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Did it make you slim though?

28:33
Alex Højrup Munch
Well, I'm not big today, so maybe?

28:36
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Good.

28:38
Alex Højrup Munch
I think maybe that's because of all the hard work that went into making a whisky distillery. We were nine guys that met up shortly after 2005, and Martin, Lasse, and Jesper, the three brothers, they had made a PowerPoint presentation on how to make whisky. And when you look at that presentation today, it's almost ridiculous. Everybody in that room said, of course, yes, let's go. And we did that in 2006, the first alcohol for whisky.

29:05
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And another person who thought it was a great idea was Jim Murray, who people may not know, but he's an English whisky critic who some called the whisky king. He is very accomplished in the world of whisky and a connoisseur. How did that come about that he got a taste of your whisky?

29:25
Alex Højrup Munch
It is actually a quite fun story, and perhaps this says a little bit about how little we knew about whisky when we started. Henning, the brother-in-law of Mogens, and Mogens is the father of the three brothers, and Henning was also part of Stauning Whisky. He's still part of Stauning Whisky. Moans is also part of Stauning Whisky.

29:43
Alex Højrup Munch
Many years ago, Henning was working sales within wine, and he'd been doing business with some friends. And those friends started a whisky company called Mac Y, M-A-C-Y. And Henning was not allowed to be part of that company because he had been working with sales of wine and they had some rules and some contracts, so he couldn't start up together with his friends.

30:08
Alex Højrup Munch
But when we had made the first alcohol to become this Danish whisky, Henning called up Søren, who's the the manager of this company and said, Søren, this is a secret, but we've probably made the first Danish whisky ever. And Søren was like, wow, that's interesting. Can we taste it?

30:27
Alex Højrup Munch
Oh, well, we just made it so we'll have to wait some years to taste it. And he said, Henning, by coincidence, later this year, we have our ten-year anniversary, and we've invited Jim Murray to come and do a lecture about whisky to a group of invited people. Why don't you come and let him taste your very first distillation to become a whisky?

30:50
Alex Højrup Munch
And we have to remember, this is what we call new make or white dog, typically doesn't taste very well. And this definitely didn't taste very well. We wanted to make a smoky single malt, like the Scotch west coast single malts. It had smoke in it, but that's basically it. Then it had a lot of weird flavors to it.

31:12
Alex Højrup Munch
So we didn't know, was this good, was this bad? You had to wait years to find out. So we were like, aahh, one of the biggest connoisseurs of whisky in the world meeting Stauning Whisky, a whisky made in an abattoir, the west coast in Denmark, maybe that's not the best idea in the world.

31:29
Alex Højrup Munch
But Søren is very persuasive. He kept on calling and writing, and finally we said yes. Because he said, what can happen? He can say, this is not that good, you have to improve your work. So we're like, yeah, and we needed the answers about was this good or bad?

31:46
Alex Højrup Munch
So we went to Mac Y and met Jim Murray before this lecture about whisky. And we ended up sitting together with Jim for about one and a half hour, and the guests came and left because Jim was so baffled about what he had just been witness to with our alcohol.

32:05
Alex Højrup Munch
He said, this is probably the most interesting I've tasted for 20 or 25 years I've been working with whisky. And Søren came in several times to say, Jim, the guests are here, are you coming out? And Jim, every time he said, no, no, five minutes more or ten minutes more, 20 minutes more. And I need some more time with these guys.

32:24
Alex Højrup Munch
And after one and a half hour, Søren came in and said, now the guests have left, and he said, that's okay, that's okay, 'cause this is so interesting. So he said to us, if you continue what you're doing right here, you will one day make the best whisky in the world. Of course you need to improve. But this reminds me of Ardbeg from the end period of the '70s.

32:45
Alex Højrup Munch
Ardbeg is a Scotch single malt whisky, and the whisky we wanted to create, a replica of Ardbeg from 1977. That was the goal for us. So him saying Ardbeg from the end period of the '70s was just spot on. From an early stage, there were high hopes of what we could do with our whisky.

33:05
Alex Højrup Munch
On the same day, Jim said, but there's a lot of scotch single malt out there. My favorite whisky is rye whisky. He had been driving through the rye fields going to Mac Y, I think it was July, August. He said, I've seen all the rye fields in Denmark. Why don't you make rye whisky? 'cause we all know that rye bread is a big part of Danish culture.

33:28
Alex Højrup Munch
So why would you make a Scotch single malt if you can make a rye whisky that's part of your culture? So actually he was the one that gave us the idea to start up making rye whisky, which is 80% of what we do today. We also do single malts, and we also do a mix of single malts and rye whisky. But rye whisky is by far the most sold of our products.

33:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And maybe try to explain who he is, Jim Murray, in the world of whisky and what it means to somebody like you and Stauning that he endorses you.

34:01
Alex Højrup Munch
Jim is the author of Whiskey Bible and Whiskey Bible is probably the most sold whisky book in the world. We had our three-year-old whisky in his Whiskey Bible. Usually whisky is six or ten or 15 years old. Three years is the minimum of whisky in aging, you can't get any lower, you can't call it a whisky in Europe.

34:25
Alex Højrup Munch
It's the first time he brought in a three-year-old whisky into his Whiskey Bible and we got a score, I think of 94 or 95, which is a very high score. So for him to do that meant a lot for us, not just in Denmark, but also worldwide that something special is going on in the west coast of Denmark. So it's been very positive for us to have that endorsement.

34:47
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You became a business in 2011, I believe, and you became part of the commercial world of whisky making. What was the transition like, from hobby to business?

35:00
Alex Højrup Munch
The first years, you can call it a hobby, but in Denmark, you can't really have alcohol as a hobby. There's too many approvals from the tax department, food departments. You need to make a professional company. We did that in 2006. But let's be honest, it was basically a hobby, the first years.

35:19
Alex Højrup Munch
Can you make whisky? What style of whisky? Does people like your whisky? Starting a whisky in Denmark, people were laughing at us in the beginning. You don't make whisky in Denmark, you make whisky in Scotland. It's just stupid what you're doing. Nobody expected it to be good. So we actually had a lot of resistance.

35:34
Alex Højrup Munch
When we then sold our first whisky — actually it was not a whisky, 'cause it was too young to be called a whisky, it was only two years old. It was actually Jim Murray who said your product is now so good that you can actually sell it and get some money into your company, then scale up the company.

35:52
Alex Højrup Munch
So in 2011, we sold our first alcohol that was the rye, and we called it Young Rye. And we said it's made by Stauning Whisky Distillery, but it's not a whisky. That was important, because then we'd probably get removed from the shelves if we had called it a whisky. That transition was interesting because nobody expected anything from us in Stauning.

36:17
Alex Højrup Munch
Nobody. We were the laughing stock in the beginning. You can't make whisky in Denmark and I think that's the Jante Law doing its best in Denmark. That was really a tough time. Then we got our first scores on the rye, and people were like, what? That's incredible. How can they get such a high score on a whisky that's actually not a whisky yet?

36:40
Alex Højrup Munch
We sent out samples to whisky writers, to whisky clubs. We went to trade shows in Denmark. People tested it, and in the beginning, they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is okay, come back when you are ten years old and then it will be good.

36:52
Alex Højrup Munch
Then we started doing blind tasting. Instead of telling them, this is a two-year-old product, or later on a three-year-old product, we actually just said, taste this. And people were like, wow, this is amazing, this is real nice. Slowly, it did a lot for us. In 2013, we were lucky to get our whisky into Noma in Copenhagen.

37:14
Alex Højrup Munch
That was a turning point for Stauning Whisky, getting that approval from the best restaurant in the world. And they actually removed all other whiskies from the restaurant and only had Stauning in the first many, many years. And they're still buying whisky from Stauning. That really speeded up things after that.

37:32
Alex Højrup Munch
Everything we put for sale got sold within seconds. Our website crashed several times because too many people wanted to buy whisky. We couldn't keep up. It was hectic times, '13, '14, and '15, in a positive way. We had almost way too much work to do.

37:49
Alex Højrup Munch
We hired more people. We got professional. We did more guided tours, got more tourists to the area to visit our distillery. And then in 2015, we decided to go to the next level. We really scaled up the business.

38:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How did you decide the identity of the whisky in terms of labeling?

38:10
Alex Højrup Munch
The first we did back in 2011, the first rye. That was actually my cousin Jillian, she's a graphic designer. She helped up with the first logo and the font, the style, everything. The box, for instance —my co-founder Lasse got some great ideas and I was in charge of the design process.

38:28
Alex Højrup Munch
Actually, I think we made a quite interesting new style of product in the beginning. When we look back now at the bottle, we think it's terrible, it's not very good. But at that point of time, I think it was very new to people to see that kind of fresh, different style label box, all of that. Later on, we needed to create a stronger identity for Stauning. And that's where the bottle we have today comes into the picture.

38:53
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Do you personally have a business philosophy and do you implement it in the company?

39:01
Alex Højrup Munch
Yes. The nine founders, we started a company being friends, and we all know that's a very dangerous thing, being friends starting a company. Imagine nine friends starting a company, not just three, but nine friends. That could be a terrible thing.

39:17
Alex Højrup Munch
When we shaped our first contract between the nine founders, we basically put down on paper that we want to make money and we want to have fun. But we don't want to make so much money that we don't have fun, and we don't want to have so much fun that we don't make money.

39:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah, that's good.

39:38
Alex Højrup Munch
So there needs to be a balance in this. We need to be friends and keep on being friends. If something comes in between us, something is wrong, we need to take care of it. So that's been quite a big philosophy of Stauning Whisky from the beginning.

39:50
Alex Højrup Munch
Second, we want to be local. Everything we do must be local. We are, again, in Stauning, the west coast of Denmark, the outskirts of Denmark. It's not easy to be in the west coast of Denmark. You don't have a lot of cool stuff going on at the west coast compared to Copenhagen. So we need to help each other.

40:11
Alex Højrup Munch
So for us it's been very important that if we hire people, it's not professional distillers from Scotland or from Copenhagen. It's local people we hire and we teach how to distill. We use local grain from farmers that are our friends in the local area. When we do bottling, it's people from the local area, family, friends that helped us do the bottling of the whisky.

40:34
Alex Højrup Munch
So we try to keep it as local as possible, because that also shows our support to the people that helped us in the beginning shaping our company. So paying back to the local area is very important.

40:47
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You export to so many countries. Since we are in the US, tell us if there is anything particular that is important to know in terms of the US you would advise others in a similar situation to do?

41:04
Alex Højrup Munch
Yes. It's very expensive to export into the US. It's very time-consuming and you need to have a lot of patience. I think that's the key words from my side. We've done a lot of tough work over the last couple of years. And it's so much more expensive to start exporting into the US.

41:26
Alex Højrup Munch
The system just makes it so much more difficult to be on top of the situation yourself. You need to trust a lot of people, importers, distributors, retailers. In Denmark, you can go directly to the consumer or to the retailer and tell the story, sell your whisky. In the US there's this three-tier system you have to go through.

41:48
Alex Højrup Munch
And unfortunately, you need to be big to have success. If you're small, it's very difficult. You need really hard work to get to the level where people take you seriously. You need to do the hard work yourself to actually go to the top. And that takes time. Or you need to become very lucky to get that quick journey to the top.

42:09
Alex Højrup Munch
And I hear that from all over, the Danish businesses going to the US. You need a big pile of money. You need a lot of time, a lot of patience, to start a business in the US and start exporting your products, because Denmark, it's a tiny, tiny country.

42:24
Alex Højrup Munch
Actually it was very clear to me the first time I was in Chicago, I was standing — is it called Lake Michigan? The shores of Lake Michigan looking out — and I couldn't see any land on the other side. I took out my telephone and I zoomed in on Lake Michigan and I compared it to the size of Denmark.

42:43
Alex Højrup Munch
And there was not a very big difference between Lake Michigan and the size of Denmark. And then I looked up the greater Chicago area, and there's the same amount of people living in Denmark.

42:52
Alex Højrup Munch
This just showed me how tiny Denmark is. So if you want to make your way into the US, you do need to be very persistent and persuasive and have a lot of energy because just by being Danish doesn't make the way into the US. We are not that big.

43:08
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What would you like to achieve in the US? What are your goals here, dreams that would come true US-wise?

43:14
Alex Højrup Munch
When we are sustainable as a business in the US, I think then I'm very happy. Some of the first milestones we wanted to achieve was actually being served at the best bars in the US. And we actually very quickly achieved that.

43:30
Alex Højrup Munch
For instance, The Dead Rabbit in New York, some years ago voted as the best cocktail bar in the world, we were on the menu. That was quite an achievement to actually travel to New York, go to The Dead Rabbit, sit in the bar and drink your own whisky. We've been to many bars now, we have many tastings, many collaborations.

43:50
Alex Højrup Munch
And this is actually quite fun. Undercote is a cocktail bar below a Korean steakhouse in New York called Cote. It's one of the best cocktail bars in the world. And we've just launched a single cask just for them. And it's a rye whisky that's matured in a gløgg cask. So molded wine gløgg, which is very Danish. They absolutely adore this whisky in this place in New York, and people want to buy the bottle every time.

44:24
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What about LA? You're mentioning New York all the time? No, I'm kidding. But what about Los Angeles?

44:30
Alex Højrup Munch
And you are right. Yeah, you are right. The next step for us is actually California. When we started our website a year ago — you can go to our own website, buy a bottle and get it sent to your home in the US or almost all over the US. We noticed that 65–70% of the orders came from California. We just talked to our importer about starting up in California. California could actually be quite fun to do a tasting or promo tour, or something like that.

44:57
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah, that's good. And finally, what are your dreams regarding Stauning Whisky, and will you always be working there or do you have other dreams, career-wise, that you would like to fulfill? Maybe go back to carpentry or engineering or architecture or something like that?

45:16
Alex Højrup Munch
I think I've been too long away from engineering. Engineering is an area where you have new rules coming up regularly. My wife is an architect, so I think we have enough architecture in our house, in our family right now. I hope, and I think that I will, always be with Stauning Whisky. I know my kids are talking about wanting to work for Stauning Whisky.

45:36
Alex Højrup Munch
I believe I'll be in Stauning until I die, hopefully. We have an ambition that Stauning will be a major whisky brand worldwide over the next many years, and we hope that in some way we will create a legacy, so we'll be here for the next several hundred years, like the Scotch whiskies have been here for 200, 300 years.

45:51
Alex Højrup Munch
If not, if something should happen, now I've been together with the eight other founders, and we tend to be pretty creative, I'm pretty sure I'll start a new business or something similar to this if something should happen to Stauning. But I don't believe that something should happen to Stauning.

46:09
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
On that note, thank you so much for being part of Danish Originals, Alex, we appreciate that you were part of it.

46:16
Alex Højrup Munch
Thank you very much. I'm happy to be part of this so that I could contribute to maybe a good story about Danes doing something in the US.

46:25
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
We are very happy that you were with us.

46:30
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Alex Højrup Munch chose SMK, or the National Gallery of Denmark, designed between 1889 and 1896 by Vilhelm Dahlerup and Georg Møller, and the extension in 1998 by C.F. Møller.