A blender’s vodka in Skåne.

Purity Vodka is a Swedish organic vodka made in Skåne, in the south of the country. Its website, as archived in 2010, described Purity Vodka AB as “an independent company in the spirits industry founded by Master Blender Thomas Kuuttanen,” based in Malmö, with its distillery at Ellinge Castle near Eslöv. A company press release of July 2014 called Kuuttanen its master blender and founder, said he had twenty years of experience making whisky, gin and akvavit before the project, and described the business as then in its tenth year.

The distillery stands on an estate with an older distilling past. English Wikipedia’s article on Ellinge Castle says a distillery on the south side of the castle grew from a small 18th-century malthouse into a distillery yard, and that its building was demolished at some point between the early 1890s and 1913, when distilling moved elsewhere on the property. Purity’s own operation is newer and smaller: the drinks writer Camper English, visiting in October 2011 for his blog Alcademics, found it in a small building just across the moat from the castle, whose owners lived in a large house on the estate and rented the castle out for weddings and events.

Kuuttanen presented the vodka as a personal project. “I have created a vodka the way I like it myself,” he told guests at a company celebration in Sweden reported by The Spirits Business in October 2015, where he led the distillery tour and a comparative tasting.

Thirty-four distillations, explained.

The number 34 runs through the brand. The company’s 2010 website said its vodka came to life in “a proprietary pot still” designed specifically for vodka, and that during the thirty-four distillations ninety per cent of the liquid was lost, leaving a spirit it said needed no filtration. Its press releases of 2014 described the still as made of copper and gold.

Camper English’s 2011 report explained how the count works. The still, he wrote, is a pot base with two attached columns of eight plates each, and each plate is counted as a full distillation — the pot plus sixteen plates makes seventeen per run, and running the process twice gives the claimed thirty-four. The mash of wheat and barley, he reported, was fermented at a certified organic brewery near Copenhagen; the house distillate was then blended with a neutral, column-distilled spirit and brought to strength with a mix of natural mineral water and deionised water. Kuuttanen told him he had tried mineral water alone, but minerals precipitated and left a white ring around the bottle necks, so the two waters are balanced.

The range has since grown around that number. In 2026 the company’s website lists Signature 34 Edition, which it says gets copper contact across 34 levels over 12 hours, and Connoisseur 51 Reserve, with 51 levels over 20 hours, alongside a citron vodka and gins including Nordic London Dry 34, Old Tom 34 and Navy Strength 34. It describes the heart spirit as made from wheat and malted barley and blended with column-distilled wheat spirit. The site now trades as Purity Distillery, gives a Malmö address and names Mathias Tonnesson as master blender and Stefan Magnusson as master distiller.

Design and documentation.

The six brands in this group are spirits from northern and eastern Europe: Gammel Dansk, Malteserkreuz, Explorer, Purity, Luksusowa and Khortytsa. They span three kinds of drink — aquavit, a bitter and vodka — and spirits brands of this kind sit at many different points in the trade, from names that still carry a founder’s signature to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a state-run shop to a duty-free shelf.

A spirits brand’s identity is usually carried less by the liquid than by a bottle, a label and the place or story it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the town 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.

Black, white and copper.

The name led to a dispute with The Absolut Company. On 23 October 2014, according to a Purity press release issued later that month, Purity Vodka AB and The Absolut Company settled a number of cases that had been running in Sweden and the United States over the use and validity of the PURITY VODKA mark and the right to use the word “purity” in marketing. Under the settlement, the release said, Purity Vodka AB could keep using its PURITY VODKA mark, and both sides could freely use “purity” to describe a quality of a product. Earlier that year, in July 2014, the company had named the American actor Joel McHale, of the television series Community, as a brand ambassador, saying the United States was its main market.

Purity publishes its identity rules on its own website. The “Brand Central” section says the brand is “primarily white,” sometimes black, and uses copper to emphasise a signature or heading. It lists Purity White #FFFFFF, Purity Black #000000 (PMS Black 4 C), Purity Dark Copper #C06435 (PMS 8921 C) as the primary copper and Purity Light Copper #DD844D (PMS 8943 C) as the secondary, and says the copper stands for its copper-surface distillation. It names two typefaces: Palatino Linotype, for “classic elegance,” and Helvetica Neue, for “modern clarity.” The product logos for its vodka, gin and citron share what the company calls “the iconic Purity star,” and it asks that its heritage mark not be used narrower than 40 pixels.

For a design guide, Purity shows how a small distillery can turn a process number into a brand and then write down its own colour and type rules. Compare Absolut, the Swedish vodka on the other side of the 2014 settlement, and Svedka, another vodka with Swedish roots. For this guide we use Purity’s published black, white and two coppers, plus one deeper copper of our own, with a serif stand-in; no product or logo is reproduced.

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