If you were to infuse the vodka with caraway, cardamom, anise, cumin, fennel you’re allowed to call it Aquavit, Akvavit or Aquavit. It also helps being Danish, Swedish or Norwegian. Though, that always helps for most things, I’ve been told. In Norway, you have to use Norwegian potatoes for the distillate to be used in aquavit production.
This all stems from some monks in the south of Sweden, whom we now know where first to make what we today understand as aquavit (more or less, anyways). Their intention were medicinal, but the tradition caught on, and where further pushed by enterprising Danes, as well as clueless happy-go-lucky Norwegians doing their clueless thing.
Aquavit is divided into mainly two sub-categories; white (taffel) and aged. Aged mostly means a few months on a barrel. “Linie” indicates that the barrel has been on a ship crossing the equator (which is the line in question). The rolling of the ocean, the salt in the air, does certainly mean something for the liquor. Whether it means something GOOD, is a subjective thing.
Worth noting, as we live in Bergen; in 1531 aquavit was first mentioned in written form (as far as we know), by Eske Bille, the lord of Bergenhus festning. In the centuries that followed, Aquavit was immensely important to the Bergen economy, and at most there were more than 30 distilleries in the area we now know as Bergenhus alone. We also drank quite a lot, giving good reasoning for the prohibition that struck Norway about the same time as in the US.
Short digression about the prohibition. It is common to diss the prohibition phenomenon, but it is important to understand just how much people drank those days. We’ve been drinking beer and wine for 9000 years, at least, so drinking is just part of what we do. But, beer and wine doesn’t contain 40% alcohol. So, if you swap those two with Gin, Whisky or Aquavit, you are really on a raging bender.
People were clueless about alcoholism or other diseases that this can lead to, and drinking yourself to death was commonplace. Which was as deadly for the children and wives, as they lost the income of the husband.
Harsh times, buddy. We needed a prohibition, maybe, to understand the power of alcohol, and as a society, learning to live with hard spirits available.