A state spirit for a country coming out of a ban.

Brennivín is an Icelandic spirit distilled from grain and flavoured with caraway, a style English Wikipedia counts as a kind of aquavit. The name is older than the brand. In Icelandic, as in its Nordic neighbours — Danish brændevin, Norwegian brennevin, Swedish brännvin — “brennivín” is a general word for distilled spirits, literally “burnt wine,” English Wikipedia explains. The brand is the bottle that took the word as its name.

Its history begins with a ban. English Wikipedia says Iceland voted for prohibition in a referendum in 1908, stopped imports from 1912 and required remaining stocks to be drunk or destroyed by 1915. In 1935 the ban on spirits was partly lifted, though beer stayed illegal until 1 March 1989. Production and sale were placed with the state alcohol monopoly, then known as ÁVR and today as ÁTVR. The monopoly’s own history says it began producing alcoholic drinks in 1935, and that its best-known brand, Brennivín, has been called the “Black Death” from the beginning.

The brand’s American importer gives the same start. Brennivín was first introduced in 1935, when prohibition was partly lifted, the Brennivín America site says. The historian Stefán Pálsson told The Reykjavík Grapevine in 2018 that the state created the drink to compete with the home-distilled spirits that had spread under prohibition, and that it was a cheap spirit flavoured with caraway seeds. Brennivín America says the precise origin of the recipe is unknown, and notes that caraway is one of the few spices that grow wild in Iceland.

A label designed to put people off.

The design story is the brand’s best-known story. English Wikipedia says that, at a time when French and Italian spirits carried colourful labels, the Icelandic government demanded a stark black-and-white label for its new legal spirit, with the intention of making the drink visually unappealing and limiting demand. Brennivín America tells it the same way: a black label was chosen so the product would look unappealing, and it had the opposite effect. The American distributor Skurnik says the government chose the black label to convey the seriousness of intoxication.

The label gave the drink its nickname. English Wikipedia records it as “svarti dauði” — the Black Death — and the monopoly’s history says Brennivín has carried that name from the start. Writing for Munchies in 2014, Kelsey Osgood described a bottle with a black label reading simply “Brennivín”; Stefán Pálsson, in The Reykjavík Grapevine in 2018, spoke of the minimalist design of the well-known green bottle and its black label.

What was meant as a deterrent turned into an emblem. Brennivín America says the label is now a well-known symbol of Iceland’s signature drink and of Iceland itself, and its site calls the product “The Original Icelandic Spirit.” Pálsson offered a more sceptical view: he said the drink later fell out of favour with Icelanders, earning a reputation as a drunkard’s drink, and that the team behind it hired an advertising agency to rebrand it, while its appeal to tourists grew. English Wikipedia notes that Brennivín remains the traditional drink of Þorrablót, the midwinter feast.

Our own Brennivín font guide looks at the lettering on that label in more detail.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Nordic aquavit and spirits and Polish vodka names: Linie, Aalborg, O.P. Anderson, Brennivín, Koskenkorva, Sobieski and Soplica. Spirits brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names that still carry a founder’s story to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a bar list.

A spirits brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its spirit is actually distilled and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its spirit is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Reykjavík brewery, and a bottle that crossed the Atlantic.

The state did not make Brennivín for ever. ÁTVR’s history says it stopped all production in 1992 and sold its manufacturing equipment to private companies. Skurnik, the brand’s American distributor, dates the privatisation of Brennivín to 1989, the year beer became legal, and says it has since been made by Ölgerðin Egill Skallagrímsson. The two accounts give different years; both agree that the brand left state hands and that Ölgerðin makes it today. Ölgerðin lists Brennivín among the brands it owns, and the contact address on the Brennivín site is the company’s in Reykjavík.

Ölgerðin is itself an old Reykjavík name. English Wikipedia says the company was founded on 17 April 1913 by Tómas Tómasson, beginning with a low-alcohol malt drink, and is named after Egill Skallagrímsson, an early inhabitant of Iceland and the central figure of Egil’s Saga. Its drinks include Egils Pilsner, Egils Gull and the orange soda Egils Appelsín. The Tómasson family sold its share in 2000; Lind ehf., a subsidiary of Danól, bought the company in April 2002, and in 2007 it was acquired by Októ Einarsson and Andri Þór Guðmundsson together with Kaupthing bank, English Wikipedia says.

Brennivín reached the United States in 2014. Munchies reported in April 2014 that Joe Spiegel, who had been carrying bottles home from trips through Iceland for friends, had negotiated for three months with Ölgerðin to import it, starting with a few bars and shops in Jackson Hole, New York and San Francisco. Skurnik names him as the founder of Brennivín America. English Wikipedia says exports to Germany and Canada followed.

The name needs care in searches. Because “brennivín” is the ordinary Icelandic word for spirits, English Wikipedia notes that other Icelandic distilleries make their own drinks in the style; the brand is the one made by Ölgerðin, whose American site is brennivin.com.

For a design guide, Brennivín shows how a label designed to discourage buyers can become the emblem of a country’s drink, built on black, white and a single word. Compare O.P. Anderson, the Swedish aquavit launched in Gothenburg in 1891, and Aalborg, the Danish akvavit. For this guide we use label black, label white and bottle green with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Brennivín’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.