Dubhe is the first release in Spirit of Hven's Seven Stars series, named for the seven brightest stars of Ursa Major — the Great Bear — which wheel endlessly above the island's latitude. Each expression in the series draws on a different cask recipe and peating level, and Dubhe, as the alpha star, sets the tone with a richly sherried, lightly smoked profile.
Built on organic barley from the island and surrounding Scanian fields, Dubhe is distilled in Spirit of Hven's bespoke copper pot still and matured in a careful blend of casks — including first-fill sherry — that founder Henric Molin coopers and chars himself. Bottled at 45% ABV, unchill-filtered and natural colour, it expresses the distillery's scientific-artisan ethos at its most generous.
There is a drama to this whisky befitting a star that sailors once used to find true north. The sherry gives weight and darkness; the island's cold maturation gives clarity; the whisper of peat gives direction. Together they form a whisky that feels both anchored and celestial.
Tycho Brahe would surely have approved of a distillery that bottles constellations, and of this particular pour — complex, considered, and unmistakably Nordic. Dubhe is not a whisky to rush. It is, like its namesake, something to navigate by.
