Totally Stockholm 1
I haven’t been able to travel much but the future
looks bright and it’s quite an easy task, showing people how to mix good cocktails with Mackmyra and trying to inspire people – from bartenders to whisky nerds to regular people who haven’t yet understood the appeal of a real Swedish Single Malt Whisky. They don’t just call you a tasting expert and innovator, but also Sweden’s premier cocktail connoisseur. It’s windy at the top they say, how much of your time do you devote to cocktails in order to maintain that position? Haha, I don’t know if being a connoisseur would be one of my distinct qualities, I appreciate a Pucko [a Swedish cold chocolate drink] as much as I do a negroni. I have become better at separating my private life and my work life but many of my friends have a strong interest in drinks so of course we talk about that a lot of the time, I think that contributes as well to wanting to know more about new products and what other people in the business do. Even if the business has been asleep for a while due to Corona. And I wouldn’t call myself the best at cocktails, but what I can say is that there are a lot of older people in the industry, part of various academies who really shouldn’t be there anymore, as they don’t have a clue what’s going on anymore. New young blood is needed to push the business forward, because there seems to be a little moss growing on some of the people at the top. Do you remember your first cocktail? And what was your most recent one? I have no idea what it was, but I was horribly bad the first years, but luckily I managed to hide my incompetence with cream and sprite. Nowadays I work with simple flavours, three ingredients can be enough to elevate a liquor to unimagined heights. As for most recent, I worked the Cadier Bar last Saturday so I made everything from old fashioneds to champagne cocktails. Going back to Mackmyra, they are proud to challenge the norms of the whisky world and sometimes even include Swedish flavours, to highlight Swedish nature to audiences abroad. How do you feel they do with their seasonal whiskies generally, and what’s your view of the new Jaktlycka, containing such Swedish staples as blueberries and lingonberries? I think it was very much for that reason that I took the job, they are very progressive and want to challenge an industry that is very stale. It’s great to have some Swedes who could care less how the Scots always did things and instead just do their own thing. Jaktlycka was very successful if you ask me, there is a natural fruitiness in a lot of Mackmyra’s whiskies and that is enhanced here with both blueberries and lingonberries. I’m actually going away later today to test mixing cocktails wih Jaktlycka. As a renowned whisky guy, how do you usually drink your own whisky? Just straight up, I want every whisky to be a surprise for your mouth. I don’t smell it so much beforehand, you can do that later, just down with it and let yourself drown in the flavours. And I hate that there’s only ONE way to drink whisky, just do it however you please as long as you are happy with it yourself. Do you still work with stories as much when creating new cocktails or do you sometimes just stick to having various flavours as a starting point? That comes down to how I feel on the day, but with both the Cadier Bar and with Open/closed in Umeå, my focus was on creating stories for the 14