Christmas drink traditions in Sweden

I am currently stocking up on my specially brewed Christmas beers, both alcohol-free and otherwise, along with glögg, julmust and svagdricka (explained below). All of these seasonal drinks appear in the Swedish shops, or they can be ordered from the central warehouses. The products available can vary from year to year.

The first of these drinks (glögg) is a punch or mulled wine, which is traditionally consumed during winter, especially around Christmas. The recipes vary widely throughout Scandinavia, but essentially it is based on white or sweet wine, or spirits such as brandy or cognac. Water is first boiled and the chosen spices are added to it, and this is simmered. The resulting mixture is sieved, and the wine or spirits are added; or fruit juice is added for a non-alcoholic version. It is consumed with gingerbread (round, star-shaped, heart-shaped), and almonds and sultanas are soaked in the brew in the special cup it is served in. You can read more about it here, or watch a video here.

The second drink (julmust) is a soda. The underlying syrup (called must) is apparently made exclusively by Roberts in the town of Örebro. This syrup is sold to soft-drink manufacturers, who then make the final product their own way. The syrup is apparently made of carbonated water, sugar, hop extract, malt extract, spices, caramel colouring, and citric acid. You can read more about it here or here.

The third drink (svagdricka) is a low-alcohol malt drink (less than 2.25% ABV). It is sweet and dark. You can read a little more about it here.
  

There are also the specially brewed Christmas beers, both alcohol-free and otherwise. Swedes love their beers, and there are special brews released for different celebrations (Säsongslanseringar = Seasonal releases), including Easter, and Octoberfest, in addition to Christmas. You can check out the current alcoholic releases (80 at the time of writing, mainly ales, and dark or medium-dark lagers) from the alcohol-monopoly (Systembolaget), with the catalog at: Julöl. I should also note that many of the low-alcohol beers in Sweden are actually very good.

Sweden also makes many fruit wines, as I recently noted in my post: What countries are best represented in Sweden’s wine retailer monopoly?

Jack Jakobsson has a summary (in Swedish) of the 2025 Xmas drink releases at: Julen 2025: Systembolaget | hela provningen.

This is, indeed, a joyous time! God jul! 1

1 Note that on 27 August 2025 a publication appeared called: How much is too much? A methodological investigation of the literature on alcohol consumption and health. It states: “We conclude that the claim that ‘there is no safe level’ of alcohol intake is not sufficiently supported based on our current scientific knowledge.” Quite right, too.

Increasing preference for wine consumption in northern Europe

I have recently looked at: Long-term (mostly negative) trends in Nordic alcohol consumption. In particular, I have looked at current wine sales in some of the Nordic countries, with their government-owned alcohol retail monopolies (they are not big wine producers):

• Sweden
• Norway
• Finland

This week I will show you that their consumption does now focus more on wine rather than the more traditional beer (and spirits). These data come from the Annual Database of National Beverage Consumption Volumes and Expenditures, 1950 to 2015.

This first graph refers to beer intake per person (up to 2015). As you can see, since 2000 beer consumption as a percentage of total alcohol intake per year has been less than 50% and decreasing in the three Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden), whereas in Finland (the fourth Nordic country) it has remained fairly flat and just above 50%.

For wine, on the other hand (in the next graph), per person consumption has been increasing since the 1970s, although it took a bit of a blow in Finland in 2000 (the Covid pandemic).

This Finnish phenomenon can be seen in the third graph to be a result of a burst in spirits consumption at that time — apparently the Millennium seriously affected the Finns! Otherwise, Finland and Denmark have had a fairly constant per person spirits consumption for quite some decades, whereas Sweden and Norway have shown a decrease.

In my previous posts I had a look at which wine–producing countries now do well in the Nordic wine retailers, noting that they fit in line with other European countries; that is, the wine producers France, Italy, Spain, and Germany, plus the USA. This changing preference does match their accession to the European Union (EU), with its free trade within a single market (Denmark 1973, Finland 1995, Sweden 1995).

Norway is not a member of the European Union, but is associated with it through the European Economic Area (EEA), which allows it access to the EU‘s single market (Norway–European Union relations). It has contemplated joining the EU several times.

Sweden is not actually restricted to a government alcohol retail monopoly

Last week I reported on the obtainability of wine in Sweden (The availability of wines in government-owned retail monopolies). I noted that, for a population of 10 million people, it is actually quite a good selection, even though it is accessible only through a single government-owned retail monopoly (called Systembolaget).

This week, I discuss the fact that beer is a completely different thing:

 In Sweden, beer is freely available in supermarkets!

This topic is worth reviewing, even though this is nominally a wine blog.

The basic point here is that Sweden distinguishes between low-alcohol and high-alcohol drinks, and high-alcohol drinks can be sold only through Systembolaget. Low-alcohol beer (up to and including 3.5%), on the other hand, can be sold through supermarkets (livsmedelbutiker).

This situation has existed on and off for nearly a century, because Sweden has traditionally been a beer country, as well as a spirits-drinking country. It is the latter (spirits) that was being addressed by the creation of Systembolaget, as I discussed in last week's post.

Sweden basically recognizes four types of beer, based on alcohol content by volume (Beer in Sweden):
    Light beer (lättöl)          <2.25%
    Folk beer (folköl)           2.25—3.5%
    Medium beer (mellanöl) 3.5—4.5%
    Strong beer (starköl)      >4.5%
Up to and including Folk beer can be sold in food shops, but Medium and Strong beer can be sold only through Systembolaget.

So, it is Mellanöl that has been the topic at issue for the government. The original plan was to get the people off the spirits and onto Medium beer, instead. So, they allowed it to be sold in food shops (The rise and fall of medium beer):

The introduction of middle beer in the 1960s is connected with the return of strong beer in 1955. Strong beer had been banned since 1923. During the entire counter-book period when alcohol was rationed in Sweden, it was basically only possible to get hold of strong beer at a pharmacy if you had a doctor's prescription. Otherwise, it was pilsner with roughly the same alcohol strength as today's Folk beer.

Medium beer had a stormy and short career in the Swedish grocery stores 1965–1977. The idea was that it would make the Swedes more sober; but instead it came to be associated with problems and drunkenness. The Medium beer got its own tax class, class IIB, which was beer with an alcohol content between 3.5 and 4.5 percent by volume. After the Medium beer ban, all beer over 3.5% by volume was classified as Strong beer.

So, the current situation is that anything up to and including 3.5% alcohol can be sold in the supermarkets. To illustrate this situation, I manually went through the online catalog of my local supermarket (ICA) to create a list, and supplemented it by scanning the shelves. The resulting summary is shown in the above table. There are at least 90 different beers, with the majority at either 0.0% (alkoholfri) or 3.5% (folköl) alcohol by volume.

This is not too shabby; and remember this represents only one supermarket chain — there are two other large ones (Coop; City Gross) that will have somewhat different selections. However, most of the beers are not all that exciting — they are beers for the masses, not the connoisseurs. For this, we must turn to Systembolaget.

So, I have also gone through their online catalog (Systembolaget), as I did last week for wine. The resulting summary is shown in the table above. This is much better! There are 4,243 alcohol-containing beers and 58 alcohol-free beers; and Swedes clearly prefer their ales and lagers, as you can see. The alcohol content can get pretty high, for beers (max 17.2%), making most of the styles Strong beers (as defined above).

Most of the beers are produced in Sweden, as shown in the table below for the eight most-productive countries. Belgium, Great Britain, the United States and Germany also provide quite a few, for a market of <10 million people.

Interestingly, there are, indeed, some specialist beers among the crowd. As but one example, there are beers with specified years of production, dating back to 2015 (2 beers), 2016 (3), 2017 (1), 2018 (5), 2019 (2) and 2020 (5). Sweden is responsible for 9 of these beers, Belgium 5, Denmark 3, and the USA 1 (as shown in the picture below).

How long this situation will continue is not clear. There are, for example, repeated proposals to the government to allow wine to also be sold in supermarkets (eg. 2015, 2023). After all, Sweden is part of the European Union, and so we can freely bring stuff in from there, not the least being alcoholic beverages. What is the point of the local government being restrictive?

There is also the recently expressed opinion that even alcohol-free beer is not a sign of societal progress (Alcohol-free beer hype is unhelpful). Tom Wark rightly has a go at this idea (First they came for alcohol...now they come for non-alcohol). Mind you, it has also been reported that Beer-only drinkers’ diets are worse than wine drinkers. Take note!

In the meantime, like all Swedes, I am currently stocking up on my specially brewed Christmas beers, both alcohol-free and otherwise, along with glögg and julmust. This is, indeed, a joyous time!