Over a barrel
Trip Start
Jun 13, 2007
1
12
22
Trip End
Sep 23, 2007
Stavanger,
Western Fjords,
Norway
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
I was in the small city of Stavanger in Norway for a three-day culinary summit organised as part of the city's year-long program of events as the Cultural Capital of Europe.
Linie Aquavit is standard content in every Norwegian freezer - for that celebratory down-the-hatch nip chased by Norwegian lager, quick pick-me up before and after a hard day's work or as an accompaniment to some of Norway's food delicacies such as ' fenalår' (cured leg of lamb) or stockfish (dried cod).
The answer to why it is kept in the freezer is lost in the mist of time and is all wrong anyway, we were told by the affable Halvor Hauch, the Linie distiller
Linie...it's all in a barrel
. Linie had to be sipped, he told us, like a good cognac and by keeping it in the freezer and sculling it down, we would miss the enjoyment of all the subtleties a good Linie aquavit had to offer.
Linie had several types of aquavit we learned. There's the aquavit you have with smoked sheep's head, then there's the other kind which you have with 'lutfisk'; another Norwegian delicacy made from stockfish soaked in lie and then poached.
Generally, Linie is a good digestive after a particularly fatty meal. Besides caraway seeds, Linie also contains hints of other herbs and spices such as aniseed and cinnamon.
Linie has even had a special Riedel glass made for the drink - looking something like a small cognac glass narrowing into a short flute.
The honour of introducing aquavit to Norway we are told must be attributed to the last Catholic archbishop of Norway, Olav Engelbrektsson, the de facto ruler of Norway in the 15 hundreds, for whom the brew was originally made as a cure-all.
This links me personally to the brew - because Engelbrektsson's minder and fixer, a fearsome seafarer by the name of Christopher Rustung, is a distant relative of mine, who no doubt would have partaken in the brew with the ill-fated archbishop who had to flee the country during the reformation.
Rustung, whose CV includes piracy in the Baltic Sea followed by many years in the service of the Danish king as trusted admiral of his his fleet, went down in history for procuring two ship from the holy Roman emperor in 1536 to bring the archbishop to safety in the Netherlands.
But I digress. Meanwhile, over the next 200 years or more, distilling of aquavit from grain became widespread in Norway, and distilling pans were increasingly a common sight in the farmers' kitchens throughout the country.
It was the only drink which did not freeze in the cold Norwegian winter and Norwegians became accustomed to taking a glass before starting work in the fields or forests on cold, dark winter mornings.
But the real breakthrough for the brew came in 1805 when Jørgen Lysholm collaborated with his aunt Catharine Lysholm who owned the brig Trondheims Prøve (Trondheim's Trial) and started to make aquavit from potatoes. They sent the new potato spirit stored in sherry casks to Batavia in 1805, hoping to drum up business in new markets while the Nepoleonic wars made it difficult in Europe.
However, then as now aquavit appeared to be an acquired taste and the experiment failed. The spirit was returned to Norway in 1807 but it was soon discovered the storage in the sherry casks and the voyage across the equator (or 'line' as referred to in Norway, hence the name 'Linie', meaning line) had vastly improved the taste of the aquavit.
The positive effect of the sea voyage and the maturation of the alcohol was commercialised by the Lysholm family. Australia became involved early in the process when one of its ships, the Gymer, carried casks of aquavit across the equator when it sailed around the world via Australia.
Since 1927, the Norwegian shipping line Wilhelm Wilhelmsen has assumed the responsibility for this special process and their ships are to this day carrying sherry casks of Linie Aquavit on deck across the equator and back to Norway.
Every bottle states on the back of the label which ship carried it across the equator and when. Some of those bottles carry the name M/S Tampa - the very same Tampa of asylum-seekers-banned-entry-to-Australia fame. The hapless asylum seekers were probably unwittingly part of the famous Linie Aquavit process.
The producers of Linie Aquavit is stepping up its overseas marketing of the drink, so do not be surprised if one day soon, it will appear on the shelf of a bottleshop near you.
