Sweden’s Leveling Up the Gin Game with Hernö

Getting Hernö from Sweden’s rugged High Coast onto K&L’s shelves has been years in the making. Their story with K&L begins with our relationship with Four Pillars—the phenomenal Yarra Valley, Australia, gin producer who stole our hearts back in 2016. Four Pillars has been at the core of our gin lineup and a customer favorite since its first day on our shelves. We have even collaborated in the production of K&L’s most popular gin; Four Pillars - Faultline Gin. During our collaborations, we were able to sample some gins that otherwise had never made it to the United States. Enter Hernö.

One fateful day, the gents at Four Pillars entered our shop excited to share a hand-carried bottle of Dry Island Gin, a Four Pillars and Hernö collaboration they produced when Hernö founder Jon Hillgren visited the crew at Four Pillars. While I had tasted and loved nearly all of Four Pillar’s releases over the years, this bottle was off the charts and beautifully unique. (It remains in my top-five gins of all time and is sadly one I cannot get more of). More importantly, it set me on a path to track down Jon and taste the products that he has produced in Härnösand, Sweden. If Four Pillars respected Hernö’s work enough to collaborate, I knew their products must be stellar.

This all began shortly before the pandemic struck. The subsequent issues with the world supply chain and lockdowns made it painstaking slow, but, eventually, samples of Hernö’s three core gins reached my door—and I was flabbergasted. They were all incredibly pure, bright, lifted, and intensely flavorful—and, most importantly, balanced. I had to have them on our shelves.

As I dug into Hernö I quickly learned they had won so many major awards it would be hard to list them all. But the stand outs on the list are IWSCs Best London Dry Gin and Best Gin & Tonic as well as World’s Best Gin Distillery across various years and various gold or double gold medals at San Francisco Spirits Competition across multiple releases.

While the pandemic made logistics hard enough, U.S. law threw an extra monkey wrench in our plans to stock Hernö. The 500ml format is still illegal in the United States for spirits and Hernö’s bottling line is formatted for the common European spirits format. Fortunately Jon and his crew were willing to go the extra mile to work with us and hand bottled our entire shipment in 700mls so we could import and sell their gin. Nearly four years since I first tasted anything to do with Hernö – they are finally here and available exclusively to K&L customers!