Tromsø brewery signs deal to quench the thirst of Swedes

Mack’s Arctic beer, a pure malt and light pilsner, is soon to be found in Systembolaget, the state-run chain of 430 liquor stores across Sweden.

Mack brewery won the bidding process where Systembolaget was looking for a light lager from a Nordic country, the newspaper iTromsø reports (pay-wall).

Canned at the brewery in Nordkjosboth, some 70 kilometers southeast of Tromsø, Mack’s Arctic beer is more Arctic than just the name. It is also the first beer to reach the North Pole on a surface expedition.

Founded back in 1877, the brewery is a legend in northern Norway.

No longer world’s northernmost

Mack is still marketing itself as “the world’s northernmost brewery” although that is no longer fully the truth. Maybe the largest in the Arctic, but not the northernmost. In Norilsk on the Taymyr Peninsula, the brewery Norilskiy Pivovarinniy Zavod makes several different types of beer including Zapolyarnoye, Norilskoye and Bavarskoye.

When Mack had its brewery in Tromsø, it was located at 69°40’ North. A few years ago, the brewery moved to Nordkjosbotn at  69°13’ North. The brewery in Norilsk on the Russian tundra is consequently today the world’s northernmost brewery. Located at 69°20’ North. 

Here, we have not counted microbreweries, like the one in Longyearbyen on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago or in the town of Honningsvåg near the North Cape in Finnmark, Norway.

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The first brewery in Norilsk started back in 1946 when most workers who built the nickel and copper factories were part of Stalin’s infamous Gulag labour camps. The brewery history in Norilsk is described in an article in Zapolyarnaya Pravda, a local online newspaper.