This article is about the saunavasta (sauna whisk) tradition. See also the Different types of sauna whisks post.

A popular tradition in Finnish sauna culture is to beat the sh*t out of your friend with birch branches called sauna whisks, or saunavihta (Western Finland) or saunavasta (Eastern Finland) in Finnish. In addition to relieving your aggressions, your friend gets a thorough deep clean and his blood circulation improves. Everybody wins.

As said, Finnish whisks are almost always made out of birch tree branches, but oak and juniper whisks are also available. I have also seen eucalyptus and linden whisks and even ones made of plastic or silicone.

Ordering whisks

You can find fresh burch whisks at traditional marketplaces in Finland. Dried whisks are available at grocery stores, for example.

Websites like etsy.com help those who live outside of Finland. Amazon has them as well but the cost seems to be quite high. Etsy.com becomes cheaper if you can order many whisks at a time and can wait a bit longer. I’d say that the cost per whisk when ordering online comes to about $10-15 a piece including shipping if you order about six to ten whisks at a tome. Look for different sellers as the shippjng costs seem to vary. Amazon charges between $25-35. In Finland, you should be prepared to pay about 5-8 euros a piece.

You can always make one yourself too and I might cover the instructions in a separate blog post later. Notice, however that you are not allowed to take branches from living trees in forests unless you own the forest, of course.

Preparation of whisks

The fresh whisks are ready to go as such. The dried whisk is first sunk into either cold water (takes up to an hour) or hot water (20 mins). If I have time, I often sink the whisk upside down in a bucket (the handle part first) and then turn it around after 20-30 mins and and leave it for another half an hour. The cold water option is always better if you have time: the leaves won’t get loose as easy then.

The Russian Venik Treatment

There are two major ways of the whisk use: the Russian way (venik massage) abd the Finnish way (massacre).

In Russian venik massage you would lay down on the sauna bench and your trusted friend would then quite gently and rhythmically apply the whisk on your body. Cute.

The Finnish Saunavasta Rite

In the Finnish saunavasta massacre, the sauna whisk is first appropriately heated up over the stove. Take the whisk from the water bucket and hold the dripping whisk about 10 inches above the stove and pour water on the stove. Rotate the whisk to thoroughly warm it. When you touch the leaves and it burns, it is good to go.

Notes for Karens: you should actually carefully touch the whisk after removing it from above the stove. If it feels too hot, it probably is too hot. You may also burn your fingers while preparing the whisk or while testing if it’s too hot. It’s a bit like hot coffee. It is hot and the lid says it might be hot. Let this act as the cautionary note. Sauna whisks may get hot and hot stoves are certainly hot.

Ask your friend to turn his or her back towards you and whack or slap her back with the whisk. As far as the proper sauna lingo goes, “bend over” goes down with varying results.

While whisking your friend, there is no need to use excess force. However, it is also quite important not to leave the hot whisk on the back. I’d say about 100 slaps per minute is probably pretty good tempo.

Then you take turns and depending on how you treated your friend, you might get a revenge. Then you both whack your feet and chest and yell in a masculine way.

I saw a documentary from Germany where they insisted that two people cannot use the same whisk for hygienic reasons. Finns believe that the heat kills the bacteria but maybe the hygiene standards have changed over the centuries. Let’s agree that Germans know better and stubborn Finns are just daredevils.

Re-using the whisks and the water

The (birch) whisks emit nice aroma. You can pour the water where the whisk is prepared and kept on the stove. Watch out that you don’t pour lose leaves on the hot rocks though.

The water will eventually get gooey but you can store it in bottles or containers and freeze them for later use: just melt the blocks in löyly water.

I always thought you could use the sauna whisk for one time only but nowadays I just leave the whisk to dry in a hot sauna and have been able to restore it in cold water for multiple uses even weeks after.

Some use sauna for aromatherapy and some just like to add some scents there. Just out of curiosity, I have spent a lot of time to test different scents.

Incense

I generally like burning incense and I brought a few of those to the sauna. It turned out that the scent is too weak so this was a nice experience but nothing to write home about.

Beer

This is the Batman of all sauna scents. It creates a nice fresh bread aroma. Just a few things to keep in mind. Firstly, never pour beer directly on the stove as it will likely burn on the stones and it will leave a bad burning smell for long time. Instead, pour a little bit (one oz or so) in a laddle that is almost full of water. Secondly, do not waste your fancy hipster beers on this. Many IPAs or fruity beers won’t smell good at all. Use the good old light beer. Thirdly, do not assume that pouring any other drink would make sense. Only water or water with just a little bit beer and nothing else.

Commercial sauna scents

Many commercial sauna scents are eucalyptus oil based and sometimes flavored with another scent like smoke, tar, birch, bacon, you name it.

It is okay to like eucalyptus smell. It is just so non-Finnish thing and literally from the opposite side of the planet. But Australians are fine people.

There are a few interesting alternatives too. I ran into a glögi/glögg scent from Emendo. Their English page translates this to mulled wine but glögi can also be made of berry juice and this one smells more like it. Anyways, nice Christmassy scent with cinnamon. Other companies like Rento also make scents of Arctic berries, if you want to try something different.

Tar

Tar is a natural and a manly product. It leaves a really nice scent but it is easy to create mess with tar too. I spent some time to find the ideal product from different sauna-related sites and stores. The issue was that many products were just eucalyptus oil with a bit of tar. I finally ended up ordering just natural pine tar that apparently is also used as an insect repellent to cover wounds on sheep. Anyway, this product at premier1supplies.com turned out to be perfect for my needs.

I just drop one small drop on a laddle. It is likely that the tar will leave marks on your sauna bucket and walls so rubbing a few drops on a stove is a better way. It should go without saying but add those tar drops before you start heating up the sauna.

Birch

Birch is very natural scent and brings back memories from childhood when the bright summer nights seemed to last forever. Yea, we were bored sometimes. The easiest way to add birch scent is to use the water where your prepare your sauna whisk. Just be careful to not throw leafs from that water on the stove. The wet leafs will eventually dry and then burn on the stove, trust me. That’s not the most dangerous thing in the world. It is even less dangerous than using a nail gun after 10 beers. Burnt leafs just won’t smell good.

I never wore a hat in sauna in my childhood and I actually had to check if anyone wore one in the pictures featured in the Unesco’s presentation of Finnish sauna culture. It turns out that Finns wear hats in sauna but my believe is that this tradition might be more popular in Russia.

In any event, sauna hats are very useful especially in barrel saunas as your auricles are very sensitive to heat and you the steam tends to be quite intense at the level of your ears in these saunas. Most hats made of cotton or wool will do as long as they cover your ears.

Some might also think that these hats are uncomfortable because they make you sweat more. That makes sense: if you wear a wool hat in a ski bar, you will eventually want to take it off. However, one of the reasons you go to sauna is that you try to sweat.

So the sauna hats are pretty straight-forward but there are a few commonly known dilemmas related to sauna hats. Firstly, for some of us, sauna is our church or sanctuary and you should not wear a hat in a church if you are a male. That what was told to me. Secondly, I am contemplating, whether a sauna hat can be wore while holding the holy grail of Sauna-Jallu. Sauna-Jallu’s and Ararat Rail’s ways are unexplored.

An essential sauna rule not to break is the so called “Ovi kii!” rule.

As you might guess, we burn decent amount of fuel of some kind to heat up the sauna and the sauna stones. You generate steam, aka löyly, by slowly pouring water on hot stones. This very inefficient, yet traditional way of generating steam practically means that the stones cool down relatively fast on their own and especially if you pour water on them.

The diagrams below show whether the (electric) stove is on or off and what happens to the stone temperature as you pour water (notice the peaks in humidity as I added water). Generally speaking, you get the best steam when the rocks are above 200c hot. If you see the steam, the rocks are too cold.

So löyly is precious and you can only get so much of it in a limited period of time. If you pour too much water on the stove, you’ll have to wain until the rocks heat up again. The challenge is then that if you keep the stove on for too long to re-heat the rocks, the sauna will get too hot.

This long intro should perfectly clarify why it is a crime to keep the door open in a sauna. However, many sauna novices don’t obviously know this so they often like to keep the door open to look inside and then slowly decide whether they want to come in to the sauna or not.

This ignorance will almost certainly result in more experienced sauna patrons yell “Ovi kii!” to you.

Ovi kii! this translates to “Shut the door for god sakes, you no-brain sauna noob! Now you ruined the steam and we have to do all this again”.

Passive-aggressive solutions to the problem

My first iteration to solve this ovi kii problem was to add a sign above the door. Not outside, to remind the person coming in but inside to remind, how to shout that phrase. The efficiency of this mitigation effort was neglible.

Luckily, Amazon is full of cheap electronic components, so the next iteration was to purchase a door sensor that would integrate with Home Assistant. This allowed us to build a logic where if the door remained open for three seconds, a smart speaker would yell Ovi kii in the sauna! This dramatically reduced trauma in my lungs.

But as opening the door while there is no löyly in the air is dramatically less serious demeanor than opening the door right after someone just added stream, we had to improve the logic with humidity sensor that uses even stronger language during those very misfortunate events.

All in all, we have now achieved the ultimate solution for the Finnish people: getting everyone in line without having to say a word. Hooray technology!

Sauna-Jallu tradition was introduced to me as late as 2019.

Jallu, aka jaloviina aka cut brandy is an iconic adult beverage in Finland. It is not a Finnish invention as such but a very Finnish drink indeed: a mixture of brandy, grain liquor and water. What makes it so Finnish then? According my knowledge, Finnish soldiers were offered small amounts of this drink to celebrate Marshall Mannerheim’s 75th birthday in 1942 during the second World War. Those were tough years and we had shortage on everything. So let’s just assume that we had enough brandy or cognac for 25% of soldiers and enough grain liquor to the rest. Instead of figuring out, who gets what, they just gave everyone a mixture of two. The two liquors don’t necessarily mix super well but this was democracy at its best.

Now, the Sauna-Jallu tradition is to bring a full bottle of this delicacy to sauna before you start heating it up. You place the bottle on the bench and let it warm up. You then share the drink when you go to sauna and everyone swishes it like you were using mouth wash. The cap will get hot in sauna so be careful. A pro tip is to turn the bottle upside down before opening the cap or sinking the neck in a bucket of water.

The experience is relatively surprising as this drink, counterintuitively, seems get better after heating. Well, you know what they say about warm vs. cold Japanese sake: premium sake is always served chilled and lower-grade sake is often heated up. Maybe the same goes with premium cognac vs. jaloviina. I am not sure what the swishing part does.

I cannot really recommend trying this out because promoting alcohol consumption is not smart and one of the warning signs that came with the sauna specifically warned against alcohol consumption in sauna. Sharing a bottle like that is not very smart either after all what we have learned during covid. Cups might be an option. A purpose-built Ararat rail is also a neat way to transport also the bottle from A to B.

If you were curious to know, how this drink is made, you just need cognac and grain liquor. As grain liquor may not always be available, I have heard that people have been using vodka instead. There are four different grades of jallu: zero, one, two, and three star:

• Zero Star Jallu – just a little bit cognac, called sergeant major
• One Star Jallu – 25% of cognac, called sheriff or second lieutenant
• Two Star Jallu – 50% jof cognac, called lieutenant
• Three Star Jallu – 75% of cognac, called captain

The key is simply to mix the two ingredients. A pro tip is to buy a bottle of each. Pour a quarter of the vodka to a separate container. Then fill the vodka container with cognac to creat a one star bottle. Finally pour a quarter of the vodka to the cognac bottle to create a delicious bottle of el capitan.