Absolut Vodka
Swedish brand of vodka
Absolut Vodka is a Swedish brand of premium vodka developed and launched by Vin & Sprit in 1977, and since 2008 a part of the French group Pernod Ricard.
Absolut is the second largest vodka brand in the world, as of 2025 selling 12.3 million 9 litre-cases annually. The vodka is made from winter wheat and is produced only in the locality of Åhus.
History
Origins
In the 1860s, Lars Olsson Smith established a spirits purification and distilling business on Reimersholme, then outside Stockholm's city limits. Using fractional distillation, the business produced brännvin initially marketed as Tiodubbelt renat brännvin ("tenfold purified brännvin") and later as Absolut rent brännvin ("absolutely pure brännvin").
After Stockholms utskänkningsaktiebolag obtained a monopoly on serving spirits in the city in 1876, Smith competed by selling his brännvin at lower prices from Reimersholme and providing free boat transport for customers. The dispute became known as the first brännvinskriget ("spirits war"), lasting from 1877 to 1879. A settlement between Smith and his competitors led to the formation of Reymersholms Spritförädlings AB in 1879.
Development, 1977–1979
In 1977, under chief executive Lars Lindmark, the state-owned Vin & Sprit began developing a product for the export market. Advertising professionals Gunnar Broman and Hans Brindfors developed concepts for a Swedish vodka, drawing on the name Absolut rent brännvin.
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This entry incorporates text from “Absolut Vodka” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.