Aufguss, Löyly, Herbal Steam — Sauna Rituals of the World

Aufguss, löyly, and herbal steam are three answers to the same question: what happens when water meets hot stones. Aufguss is the German ritual — a Saunameister pours scented water on the stones and moves the heat through the room with a towel, in timed, theatrical rounds. Löyly is the Finnish word for the steam itself, poured quietly, usually by whoever sits closest to the stove, in near silence. In Bali, a younger tradition has grown out of the island's herbal medicine: fresh and dried plants — gotu kola, cajeput, boreh spice blends — are steeped and thrown on the stones as a kind of prescription, chosen for the person and the day.

None of the three is the original. None is the correct one. They are three cultures noticing that the moment of steam is the heart of the sauna — and building very different rooms around it.

This is a short field guide to all three.

The moment they share

Strip away the towels, the birch whisks, and the apothecary jars, and the physical event is identical everywhere.

A sauna at 80 or 90°C is dry. The air holds heat, but sweat evaporates quickly, and the body copes. Then someone pours water on the stones. The water flashes to steam, humidity jumps, and evaporation — your main way of shedding heat — suddenly stops working. The perceived temperature climbs sharply, even though the thermometer barely moves.

That wave of felt heat is the event. In Finnish it has a name of its own: löyly. German has borrowed the whole ceremony around it: Aufguss, literally "infusion" or "pouring on." Bali, which had no sauna until recently, already had something else — centuries of steaming the body with herbs — and simply carried it into the dome.

Everything that differs between the three traditions is a question of what you do with those thirty seconds of steam. Who pours. Whether anyone speaks. Whether the water carries a scent, a performance, or a medicine.

Aufguss — the steam as theatre

Walk into a large German or Austrian sauna complex at five minutes to the hour and you will see people converging on one cabin. The door closes. For the next ten to fifteen minutes, nobody enters and nobody leaves.

Inside, a Saunameister — sauna master — runs the room. Scented water, often with essential oils chosen for the session, goes onto the stones in stages. Then the towel work begins: wide, practiced swings that pull the hot, humid air off the ceiling and drive it across the benches in waves. Some Aufguss sessions are quiet and almost ceremonial. Others have music, lighting, a narrative arc — the competitive form, judged at events like the Aufguss World Championship, is closer to choreography than to bathing.

What makes Aufguss distinct is not the scent or the towel. It is the structure. The session has a beginning and an end. It has an author. You surrender the pacing to someone else, the way you do at a concert. The heat arrives in composed waves, each stronger than the last, and the room endures them together. When the door opens, there is often applause.

The etiquette follows from the structure: arrive before it starts, stay to the end if you can, leave quietly if you must. The Saunameister is responsible for everyone in the room, and the room, for a quarter of an hour, is one audience.

Löyly — the steam as silence

Finland has more saunas than cars, and almost none of them have a schedule.

In a Finnish sauna, the ladle sits by the stove and belongs to no one and everyone. Custom varies by region and by family, but the common thread is understatement. Whoever sits nearest the stones might pour, sometimes with a small glance around the room — a wordless question. Water goes on. The steam rises, bites the ears and shoulders, and settles. Someone exhales. That is often the entire conversation.

Löyly, the word, is older than written Finnish and is related to words for spirit and breath in other Uralic languages. Finns will tell you that every stove has its own löyly — soft or sharp, round or thin — and they discuss it the way others discuss wine. But they discuss it afterward, outside, by the lake. Inside, the steam is the speech.

Where Aufguss is authored, löyly is communal and unhurried. Nobody performs. Nobody applauds. The ritual is almost invisible, which is exactly the point — the Finnish sauna hides its ceremony inside ordinariness. You go in, you sweat, you pour when it feels right, you leave when it feels right. The discipline is in what nobody does: no hurry, no noise, no show.

A birch whisk — vihta or vasta, depending on where in Finland you ask — adds scent and circulation, and in summer the smell of fresh birch leaves in steam is, for many Finns, the smell of the season itself. It is the closest löyly culture comes to aromatherapy, and it arrived centuries before the word.

Herbal steam — the steam as prescription

Bali never had a sauna tradition. What it had — and has — is one of Southeast Asia's oldest living herbal medicine cultures. Boreh, the warming spice paste rubbed into farmers' bodies after cold, wet days in the rice fields. Steam inhalations with cajeput and citrus leaves for congestion. Gotu kola — pegagan in Indonesian — taken for the mind. The knowledge sits in family compounds and village healers, passed along in practice rather than in books.

At our Ubud venue, that tradition meets the sauna directly. Beside the 90°C dome stands an apothecary shelf of more than fifteen kinds of Balinese herbs — pegagan, kayu putih (cajeput), boreh blends of ginger, clove, and galangal. You pick from the shelf and pack your own tea bag with your own hands; the bag is brewed into a strong, concentrated herbal tea, and that tea is what hits the stones as the löyly shot. Where most saunas reach for synthetic aroma oils, this steam comes from real herbs, really extracted. It all belongs to a fuller herbal steam ritual built around the question a Balinese healer would ask before anything else: what does this particular body need today? Even the map agrees — Ubud takes its name from ubad, the Balinese word for medicine and healing herbs.

That question is what makes the Balinese approach a third tradition rather than a variation on the other two. Aufguss chooses a scent for the room. Löyly mostly declines to choose at all. The herbal ritual chooses for the person — warming boreh spices for a body that has been cold or tired, cajeput for a blocked chest, pegagan when the head will not settle. The steam becomes a carrier for something older than the sauna it rises in.

It changes the texture of the session, too. Herbal steam is denser on the palate than plain löyly — you taste it as much as feel it. A boreh shot arrives as heat inside the heat, the ginger and clove reaching the sinuses a beat after the wave hits the skin. It is not a performance and not quite a silence. It is closer to being handed something — something you packed yourself.

Three postures, one practice

Set side by side, the three rituals ask for different postures from the bather.

Aufguss asks you to be an audience. You give up control of the timing and receive the heat as it is composed for you. There is a real pleasure in that surrender — the same pleasure as any live performance — and a social one, in taking the strongest wave together with a room full of strangers.

Löyly asks you to be a neighbor. The pacing is negotiated in glances, the silence is shared property, and the reward is a kind of equality: on the bench, in the steam, everyone is the same.

The herbal ritual asks you to be a patient, in the old sense — someone attended to. The herbs are picked for your day, not for the room, and the session bends around your body rather than the other way.

None of these is more authentic than the others. Aufguss is barely a century old in its current form; competitive Aufguss is younger than the internet. The Finnish practice is ancient, but Finland itself would resist calling it a ritual at all. And Bali's herbal knowledge predates both, even if its meeting with the sauna stove is recent. Traditions do not rank. They travel, and they cross.

Trying all three without leaving one island

If you have stood in an Aufguss storm in Munich or poured your own löyly in a lakeside sauna in Savonia, the Balinese version will feel both familiar and strange — the same wave of heat, carrying different cargo.

In Ubud, the dome runs at 90°C, and the plunges after it hold 17°C and 5°C water — chlorinated, checked daily, and we say so plainly. Between rounds there is a fire pit under the trees, and a yoga shala. The herbal ritual is the closest thing on the island to a sauna ceremony with an author — though the author here is the plant tradition, not a towel.

In Kuta, the mood is nearer to Finland by way of a rooftop: an 80–95°C geodesic dome, four individual ice baths at 17°C and 7°C, beanbags under open sky, and no schedule telling you when to pour. You find your own rhythm, which is the Finnish lesson in the end. A Saturday evening session with more structure is coming soon — Saturdays, 18:00 to 22:00 — for those who want the room to move together.

One rule crosses all three cultures without exception, and we hold to it: no ice bath after alcohol. The Finns say it, the Germans post it, the Balinese healers would not need to be told. The cold is a conversation with your own circulation, and it has to be a sober one.

If you come

Ubud is open daily 8:00–21:00, entry 250,000 IDR — one price for everyone — children from 7 at 50,000 IDR — WhatsApp +62 813-3921-110. Kuta runs daily 9:00–22:00, entry 250,000 IDR, ten minutes by car from Ngurah Rai Airport — WhatsApp +62 813-3999-351. No reservation is needed at either, though a WhatsApp message ahead helps; full details are on the prices page.

Come having read all this, or come knowing nothing. The stones do not care which tradition you arrived from. Water goes on, the steam rises, and for thirty seconds every sauna culture in the world is saying the same thing.