Australians Are Now Asking Bottle Shops to Stock Finland's Favourite Drink. Meet the Founder Who Made It.
Miselle Pons couldn't buy a long drink in Australia, so she made one herself. Now customers are walking into bottle shops asking for Kippis. She knows exactly why.
Text and interview by Saku Koskinen
Kippis, the Finnish-style long drink made in Australia, is now stocked across Victoria and the ACT through the independent bottle shop group Blackhearts & Sparrows.
It's the biggest listing the brand has had. Quite a lot had to happen first.
We sat down with founder Miselle Pons to talk about the sixteen years the idea spent going nowhere, the thirteen months it took to make it real, and the thirty-odd bottle shops that have taken it since.
For sixteen years it was the family joke
Miselle grew up in Oulu, studied law in Rovaniemi and built a career in Helsinki, eventually as general counsel. She came to Australia on a three-year posting with the Finnish listed company she worked for.
That was eighteen years ago.
From the day she arrived, she missed long drink. Not the flavour so much as what came with it.
“I’m a massive sauna crazy person. I always have been. Long drink to me is a post-sauna drink. I wanted that from the beginning.”
Ready-to-drink products kept appearing on Australian shelves and none of them were that. So she talked about making one instead. To her family, to her friends, on every trip home, for about sixteen years.
"Everybody knew. Oh, Miselle is coming back to visit, and we know what she's going to talk about. Her silly business idea."
Nobody took it seriously, and for a long time neither did she. She had a career. By the time her second long stint as head of legal ended, though, twenty years of corporate law had stopped holding anything new.
"I've seen the best, I've seen the worst. When people talked about another merger or acquisition I thought, yeah, done that a million times."
One Saturday in 2023, Mike came home exhausted from the sailing club. Miselle calls herself a sailing widow. What he'd really wanted out there, he said, was a long drink. There was beer, and not much else.
So she said the other thing.
"So why don't we just now step on it and do it."
His answer was yes, let's do it.
After sixteen years, that was the decision. She describes what followed as excitement rather than nerves.
The name came first. Everything else she had to learn.
Born in Manly, inspired by Finland. The flavour took fifteen rounds of samples to land. Photo: Paul Dear
Kippis means cheers in Finnish. It's what you say when glasses go up.
The word had arrived a year earlier, in the middle of the night. Miselle wrote it down and kept it, and when she tested it on people some told her plainly it was a mistake. Nobody in Australia would know what it meant.
She kept it anyway, because it does exactly what she wanted the brand to do.
“It’s a celebration. It’s a toast. It’s a happy word. It’s not going down, it’s going up.”
Turning that into a brand took someone who knew the industry, and Miselle didn't. The person who did was Pete Brennan, co-founder of the non-alcoholic beer brand Heaps Normal, who'd been working on the branding of a small business Miselle and Mike had bought. Mike rang her in Finland and told her to speak to him.
She calls that first call the turning point. It also showed her how much ground she had to cover.
"He mentioned what other RTDs do. I asked him, what is RTD? He said, ready to drink. That's what you're creating. I didn't even know that's what I was making."
The branding took about three months of workshops, with both families around the table. Pete went a long way into the source material, reading and watching everything he could find on sauna and ice bath culture, and rang her afterwards to report the damage.
“Miselle, you’ve changed our family life. Now we’ve got an ice bath, and we’re planning to build a sauna.”
What a long drink actually is
Almost every tasting Miselle runs opens with somebody picking up a can and asking exactly that.
The answer starts in 1952. Finland was hosting the Helsinki Olympics under a strict state alcohol regime left over from prohibition, and bars needed something they could pour quickly for large crowds (Helsinki Times). Gin and grapefruit soda, premixed. It was meant to be temporary. Finns kept drinking it, and seventy years later it's still one of the best selling drinks in the country.
In Finland it isn't a novelty. It's the thing in the fridge.
“It’s our household staple. It’s our national treasure. I compare it to what Aperol Spritz is to Italians, except long drink is probably bigger to Finns.”
Kippis itself leads with grapefruit. Bittersweet, crisp, citrusy, and, as most people tell her, not too sweet and not too bitter.
The base is gin, which in Australia is a harder sell than it sounds. Gin isn't fashionable in the ready-to-drink aisle here, and Miselle has watched plenty of people pull a face at the word before tasting anything. She's come to enjoy that part.
"They say oh, I don't like gin. And I say, try it anyway, you'll be surprised. The gin is there as the base but it's not overwhelming. People expect a gin and tonic. It's very different."
There are two versions, original and zero sugar.
On the canning line. In two years the operation has filled about 150,000 cans.
Getting it right meant knowing exactly what not to copy
Miselle decided early that Kippis would not be a copy of anything, so she set about tasting every version she could get hold of, wherever it was made, on the basis that she needed to know precisely what she wasn't making.
In one case that meant flying home from San Francisco with a single suitcase containing nothing but cans of long drink. Thirty-two kilos of it. She was about two cans over the weight limit, so she drank them at the airport, then declared the whole load at customs.
"They looked at me and said, crazy woman, just go."
What she kept was grapefruit, crispness and bitterness as a starting point. Everything on top is hers, and it took fifteen rounds of samples, tasted at her kitchen table with Mike, both of them writing notes on every one. Several were bad.
"There was one where we said, this is like dishwashing liquid."
About thirteen months from that first phone call to a finished can.
The first question is usually what a long drink is. The second is where to buy it. Photo: Paul Dear
It turns out to be a very Australian drink
The long drink was invented for a country where the summer is short and the darkest day of the year is a national talking point. Miselle sells it on a coastline where the season runs for months and most of the drinking happens outdoors.
The mismatch has worked entirely in her favour.
"We have a perfect climate. Australians are very seasonal in their drinking."
What separates it from everything else in the fridge, though, isn't the weather. It's one word, and the word is after.
In Finland a long drink follows the sauna. That's what it is to Miselle, and it's still a large part of what Kippis is, but a drink that only works after a sauna is a drink for a very small market. So she kept the shape of the occasion rather than the occasion itself.
Kippis is for after the thing, whatever the thing was. After the sailing. After the golf. After mowing the lawn, or walking up something to watch the sun go down.
The drink is the full stop on the afternoon rather than the point of it.
What she keeps out is volume.
““It’s about celebration and being together, not drinking on your own to get drunk. I always wanted Kippis to be a drink of one or two.” ”
It was never about the grapefruit
Somewhere in those two years, Miselle worked out that she hadn't been making what she thought she was making.
"It never was only about the liquid. It was never about the grapefruit. The inspiration was how we're emotionally connected to the whole concept of a long drink."
That changed how she sells it, and it's also why she enjoys it.
"I love talking about it, because at the same time I'm telling people about the life I've had in Finland."
The timing has helped more than she expected, and not only here. Last year The Guardian named the Finnish long drink Britain's drink of the summer, as it started turning up on draught in British pubs. In April, the American brand built by a group of Finns sold to the owner of White Claw for a reported USD 325 million.
“In any tasting there’s always someone who’s just been to Finland, or is going, or their cousin just came back. They stop and listen. The momentum is there.”
Australia is a long way behind both, and Miselle is one person with a canning run and a car. But it settles the question of whether Finns can sell a long drink to people who've never heard of one.
There's a precedent for how a drink travels that way, and it's the one Miselle reaches for herself. Australians didn't take up the Aperol Spritz because somebody advertised it at them. They went to Italy, had one on a warm afternoon, came home and started asking for it. Now it's on menus in every capital.
Nobody can say yet whether long drink follows the same path. But the people walking into Blackhearts & Sparrows and asking for Kippis had been to Finland, had one there, and come home wanting it again.
It's the same mechanism. It's just a great deal earlier.
And if that's what's happening, it raises a question worth sitting with. Those customers aren't really asking for grapefruit and gin. They're probably asking for whatever they were doing the first time they had one. A sauna by a lake. A husky sled somewhere in Lapland. An evening in Helsinki in the summer, when the light never quite goes.
None of that is for sale in a bottle shop. The thing that was in your hand at the time is.
Which would make Miselle right twice over. Once about her own drink, and once about the people buying it.
Miselle with Henna Nousiainen at Fleet Street in Mona Vale, the first bottle shop that said yes.
About thirty bottle shops, one at a time
The first was Fleet Street in Mona Vale. Miselle walked in, said she had a drink she'd like them to try, and left samples. A week later they told her they'd take it.
"I'd done my first sale. I was so happy. I could not believe it."
Most of the ones that followed happened much the same way. Independents only, no supermarket chains at this stage. She calls it deep and narrow: a shop that doesn't love it can't explain it, and a drink nobody explains doesn't sell.
Her first bottle shop in the Blue Mountains took delivery on a Thursday. She ran a tasting on the Friday and they sold out, with Miselle topping up the shelf from the boot of her car. They rang on the Monday wanting more.
Increasingly the shops get in touch first. And at least one that passed on it has since told her something she enjoyed hearing: customers keep asking for Kippis, and they haven't got any.
"There are three frustrated people. The customer, the shopkeeper and Kippis. And we could all be happy."
She expects they'll stock it in the end.
It's still a small operation. There's one permanent part-time employee, casuals brought in for events and tastings, and Mike when he's around. The rest, from booking the canning runs to checking the quality to getting online orders out the door, sits with Miselle. It's self-funded, which is why the growth is deliberate.
“Poor Mike hasn't got his sailing boat yet. It'll have to wait.”
There are weeks when the energy goes, usually when she's watching other brands move at a speed she can't afford. What she uses against it comes from a trek she did with her twins to Everest base camp when they were fourteen.
"There are days when you're tired and you look up and think, I have to go all the way up there. So you stop doing that. You just look at the next corner."
"But I don't regret it. I so love the whole thing."
In two years, that operation has filled about 150,000 cans.
On the way to a tasting. The stock travels with Miselle.
MAFS producer tasted it. Two months later, the email came.
The bottle shops aren't the only ones who've come back.
A producer tasted Kippis somewhere along the way, loved it, and said nothing at the time. A couple of months later she got in touch, asking whether Kippis would like to sponsor the Final Dinner Watch Party for Married at First Sight.
MAFS is the biggest entertainment show on Australian television. The most recent season reached around 16 million people and averaged 2.76 million viewers an episode.
Miselle says the decision took about two seconds.
As seen on: Married At First Sight Final Watch Party
Then Blackhearts & Sparrows wrote to her
Which brings us back to Victoria.
Miselle had pitched them. Twice, maybe three times, more than a year earlier. Samples sent, nothing back at all.
Then the email arrived, asking whether she had a distributor in Victoria or the ACT. So she asked them why now.
The answer was that people kept coming into their stores and asking for Kippis by name. Not Finns. Australians who'd travelled to Finland, worked out what a long drink was, and come home wanting one.
She sent fresh samples and waited about two weeks, which she admits made her nervous. The answer, when it came, was that they absolutely loved it.
They took the zero sugar. It has been on the shelves about a month, with no advertising behind it at all.
What's next
A wholesale platform, so venues can order directly. Then investors who understand hospitality, distribution and scaling.
"I'm a fast learner, but I'm starting to really feel I need help. It's impossible for me alone to grow."
Ask her who she's having her next Kippis with and there's no hesitation. Thursday, a golf club in Manly, with whoever she's playing alongside.
Most of them won't know the drink. Fewer will know what the word means.
By the end of the round, they will.
Miselle Pons is the founder of Kippis. Kippis is a proud member of the Finland Australia Chamber of Commerce. This interview was conducted by Saku Koskinen, Vice President of the Finland Australia Chamber of Commerce. For more information, visit drinkkippis.com and finland.com.au