The bars · Swedish Lapland

Icebar Jukkasjärvi

The original. Inside Icehotel, 200 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, in the village the ice for every other bar in the chain was cut from.

The first one

The archived page is unambiguous about the claim: this was "the world's first icebar." Guests at Icehotel had been drinking in it since the mid-1990s, in a room where the seating, the artworks and the glasses were all cut from Torne River ice.

A date the site cannot quite agree with itself on

Three English-language pages give 1994: this page says guests have used the bar "since 1994", the Mojave release describes the original bar as "developed for the ICEHOTEL in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden in 1994", and the 2010 Aquatic release says the original ice bar was created in 1994. One Swedish press release — Factory, October 2009 — dates it to 1993.

The weight of the site's own record is on 1994, and that is what this archive uses. The 1993 figure is recorded here rather than quietly dropped, because it was published by the same organisation on the same website.

Icehotel

The hotel around it is rebuilt from scratch every year. Snow and ice go up in November as the temperature drops, ice artists are invited from around the world to carve individual suites, and the whole structure melts back into the Torne in spring. The 2010 season was its twentieth. The same river ice, harvested each March, supplied the hotel and every Absolut Icebar in the chain.