What would a city be without its own distillery? Helsinki’s very own, The Helsinki Distilling Company, sits in the trendy Teurastamo district – once the workplace of the city’s butchers right up until the 1990s. When two friends launched the distillery ten years ago, it filled a century-old gap: Helsinki hadn’t had a local spirits factory for more than 100 years.
The Helsinki Distilling Company has more than lived up to the moment. It’s picked up multiple awards for its gins, whiskies and other creations – including a rather brilliant sea buckthorn schnapps.
Best of all, this red-brick distillery has become part of everyday city life. Its atmospheric bar draws a crowd from Wednesday to Saturday for great bar food, beer and wine – and, naturally, gin and tonics made with its own imaginative but well-balanced gins, flavoured with raspberry, lingonberry or lemongrass. Come the weekend, there’s often live music or a DJ spinning records.
The building itself has had quite a past: it’s been a power plant, a soap factory, a meatball workshop and even a car wash. No wonder it feels so cinematic. One of the owners, in fact, has appeared in Aki Kaurismäki’s films – those deadpan, quietly poetic portraits of Finnish life where melancholy, dry humour and warmth all meet under dim bar lights.
Teurastamo, Työpajankatu 2a R3. The Distillery Bar is open Wed–Thu 16:00–23:00 and Fri–Sat 16:00–01:00.