Fedje is a small, wild, granite island on the western fringe of Norway. Lashed by damp winds off the North Sea and home to just 500 people, it is not the place you’d expect to find a whisky distillery. Yet it is home to one that is creating an exciting niche for itself in the world of Scandinavian spirits.
After 30 minutes on an electric car ferry, we slide into the calming embrace of Fedje’s harbour. Our attention is fixed on the painted wooden houses clinging precariously to the rocky shore before we realise that right on the quayside is a distillery.
Feddie Ocean Distillery is housed in a utilitarian relic of the island’s former wealth — fish processing. More recently home to a brewery, the stills are upstairs, with the village store below.
If this was just a remote distillery making Norway’s first certified organic whisky, it would be interesting, but this is a business funded only by female investors.
Founded by serial entrepreneur Anne Koppang, Feddie is the culmination of her journey from finance through restaurant empire to angel investing. Koppang had invested in a beer company which had started a brewery on Fedje in 2015 and had a vision of a distilling there. When that didn’t work out, she stepped in to buy the site. “I couldn’t forget that plan. I thought it was such a great idea. At the time, you had hardly ever heard of whisky distilling in Norway,” she says.
As a trained sommelier, Koppang was excited by the vision of creating a whisky — one that could also fuel tourism and revive a community. She spent two years developing a business plan. Having always worked with women, she then set about bringing female investors on board.
Investing and whisky are not natural areas of interests for women in Norway, so this was a leap of faith. However, when the first whisky was bottled in December 2024 there were 1,000 women holding a stake — and taking the opportunity to learn about whisky and the stock market.
There are courses on investing and appreciating whisky, as well as networking events such as tastings or whisky festivals and visits to Fedje. The company’s pledge is that Feddie’s investors will only be female until women’s investments and share of society’s wealth match that of the men.
The investors come from all walks of life — and include one of Norway’s foremost businesspeople, Elisabeth Grieg — but about 80 per cent of them have made only the minimum 50,000 Norwegian krone investment (approximately £4,000/US$5,000).
On Fedje, Linda Husa is one of the investors. “Some people came in with this crazy new idea for a closed factory building on the island. I thought, why not? Because we have to support what’s coming up here. Because we need work... of course it doesn’t make work for everyone, but we have to put money into making something happen here,” the restaurant owner says, explaining that the population was both declining and ageing.
She admits the female initiative was attractive: “I think that if it was a lot of men coming here and starting the distillery, I wouldn’t be investing this money so easily.”
When the post of Feddie’s general manager was advertised in 2024, it was an attractive proposition for Bjørg Karin Lekva, who grew up about an hour’s drive away, but was working on the other side of Norway. Her sister had told her about the “fantastic” new business in Fedje and they had already done the distillery tour. “It’s a little bit like coming home. And I had some relatives that lived on this island, so it’s maybe in my genes, I don’t know.”
Although Lekva had never worked in the spirits world, she has skills in leadership, production, and technology and brings a different perspective to the business from her time in the meat and fish industries. “I felt like, OK, this is the thread — I have educated ‘me’ for this opportunity. And then I got the job and I was so happy,” she says.
Working for a company that has only women investors is also a factor. “It is very important because I’ve lived and worked in a man’s world — the production of meat and fish [is a very male environment] — so I think that for a female to take the risk is, for me, very inspiring.”
At the quayside, upstairs inside the former factory building, it has to be said that this is not a traditional whisky distilling set-up. There’s a sense of practical necessity dictated by the space — no airs and graces. The organic malted barley from Denmark is crushed with a rudimentary mill, before heading to the shiny stainless steel tanks originally designed for the brewery.
Here, in the mash kettle, the grist is added to hot water. Later, yeast is introduced to the wort in the fermentation tanks. The brewing process takes about six hours, and during transfer to the fermentation vessels the team adds 10 ppm of pure oxygen to promote a healthy yeast-growing environment.
Primary alcoholic fermentation usually finishes off after 40 to 50 hours and then the microbes and lactic acid bacteria from the grains do their magic for an additional 40 to 50 hours. They aim for a fermentation time of around 96 hours.
This inherited kit needs plenty of attention. “We always have one person in the still room — just monitoring and nosing every five-to-10 minutes,” explains production manager, Kevin Jo Hansen.
The idiosyncrasies are numerous. The control panel is out of sight of the stills, the water intake is shared with the shop below, the cooling system is operated manually, and there is no copper in the condenser. The hybrid still is run with a single pass distillation, achieving the necessary quality in the new make passing it from the 4,000 litre pot-still through the four-plate column with a dephlegmator.
“There is a little cool thing that happens with our spirit. Since the control system we have is not perfect and we have to control the cooling temperature manually, we get temperature fluctuations — ups and downs,” says Hansen. “That it’s not just flowing at a constant rate contributes to its unique flavour. It’s a unique way of doing it. I’m not saying it’s the correct way of doing it, but it functions for us.”
Blender and product development manager Martin Tønder Smith, a well-known figure in Norway’s whisky scene, believes these factors all add character to Feddie’s whisky. “The fact that we are the people we are, making our products on a kit that’s really not efficient, which is not a ‘high quality, Rolls Royce kit’. I think in the inefficiency in our set-up and in our equipment, lies, at least, some part of our signature.
“It’s difficult to make good products in this location with this kit. And that difficulty demands stamina from the people working in production: they don’t quit doing something because it doesn’t work the first time, or the second time, or the third time. They keep working at it until it works.”
In the blending lab, standing beside samples from some of the 1,400 casks maturing in the barrel store not far away, Smith highlights another factor. The Feddie distilling process uses surface water, but this low-lying island is washed by seawater during storms and at times the supply is quite salty. Smith, who is responsible for blending the whisky that goes to market, points to notes of brine, alongside the fruits and toffee.
He adds: “The fact that we’re using pilsner malt — instead of distillers’ malt — makes our whisky more malty on the nose. We really want that maltiness to come through. And then we have a long fermentation because we have active lactobacillus in fermentation. So we want the fermentation character to come through as well.
“I think the most important job we do in blending is to make a whisky where all the components have an equal level. I don’t want the wood to overpower the fermentation character, nor the fermentation to overpower
the maltiness.”
Creating a steady supply of Feddie’s core four-year-old whisky involves having a robust process in place. “We go back and we quality check that the result we get from each step of the process is what it needs to be. Then we just need to trust the process,” says Smith, who joined Feddie in 2021.
The spirit matures in ex-bourbon and some first-fill oloroso sherry casks which sit dunnage style in a large warehouse — a former marine fabrication business — on another part of the waterfront. The evaporation rate is about 1.5 per cent.
A glimpse of the ferry through the lab window turns thoughts to Feddie’s wider impact. Distillery tours are attracting visitors who are also making use of the self-catering accommodation developed in a former sardine factory by a company Koppang created to make Fedje into a tourism destination.
Spreading the word is the distillery’s portfolio which includes an award-winning London dry gin, an interesting oyster shell vodka, and Norwegian aquavits.
But this brings us to another of those quirks that Feddie has to contend with. The strict Norwegian alcohol laws prohibit the distillery selling its whisky on site, so visitors have to wait until they can visit a state bottle shop. The nearest branch of Vinmonopolet is in Knarvik 40km away.
Feddie’s whisky has been well received in Norway, with the first releases selling out. Sweden is the next target, and in October 2025, Feddie made its UK debut at the Whisky Show in London; it is now available in the UK.
All this helps with the economic impact on Fedje, creating jobs and reasons for people to spend money on the island. But what about the environmental impact of creating an industry in what is essentially a fragile location?
“We hope that when people come here they will see that positive things are happening to the island,” says Koppang. In her vision, she was adamant that Feddie was going to be a sustainable development. “That’s been the way from day one,” she says.
There is the commitment to make whisky only from certified organic raw materials and the distillery’s largest waste stream — draff — goes to the mainland to feed pigs. The single malt’s bottles are lightweight and made of more than 50 per cent recycled glass.
Few people make whisky without a nod to Scotland. Feddie turned to a Scottish design agency, Contagious in Leith, for its branding and to the supplier of bespoke bottles to many of Scotland’s distilleries, Verallia in Yorkshire.
There is a sign on a cliff in the west of the island that shows Fedje is closer to Shetland than the Norwegian capital Oslo. That sense of place adds subtly to the power of the women making Feddie’s whisky its very
own spirit.
