Born from a desire to share Scandinavian moments with people all around the world
Nuet Aquavit has developed the world's first super-premium aquavit, which combines the best of almost 500 years of Scandinavian tradition with innovative thinking.
The Nuet Dry Aquavit is a fresh and smooth spirit with a number of uses, including that of an excellent gin substitute. Read more about Nuet in our blog.
Our Story
Nuet Aquavit was founded in Oslo, Norway, in late 2018. Founder Morten Pharo Halle had witnessed the global rise of craft spirits, and he felt it was a shame that the quintessentially Scandinavian spirit of aquavit remained a Scandinavian secret. Aquavit has been a staple during celebrations like Christmas and midsommar in Scandinavia since 1531, and is made the same way as gin, just with different herbs and spices. Traditional aquavit's influence of heavy spices like caraway, fennel and anise made it an acquired taste, great with hearty Christmas food, but with a limited scope of use beyond that.
Due to its similarities to gin, the potential in aquavit as a spirit is huge, and this potential is what Morten decided to unlock when set out to create a whole new genre of spirits; the super-premium aquavit. He wanted to create an aquavit that combined the best of almost 500 years of Scandinavian tradition with fresh innovative thinking, in order to come up with an aquavit that was fresh and smooth to enjoy all over the world, all year round. So in 2018 he teamed up with the very talented Benjamin Lee, which spent more than 6 months and over 100 test-distillings to come up with the perfectly balanced Nuet Dry Aquavit.
The traditional herbs of fennel and anise seeds were replaced by grapefruit peel, blackcurrant and blackcurrant leaves, and the iconic caraway sourced directly from beautiful Inderøy in Norway was subtly balanced. During testing, the team had two litmus tests that needed to be passed; it had to work superbly both with tonic and in a martini. Why? Because these are drinks in which you cannot hide behind a plethora of other ingredients. It was something no other aquavit had ever been able to achieve, until the Nuet Dry Aquavit did just that in the summer of 2019.
