PEATED WHISKY IS A MYTHICAL, MAGICAL DRINK.

Some people have likened it to Vegemite - you either love it or you hate it. Like any strong flavour, sometimes you need to acclimatise. There are peated whisky drinkers out there who count PPM (phenolic parts per million, the measurement of smoky flavour in whisky), those drinkers are hardcore, and only want the smokiest drams. Others prefer a softer, subtler smoke to lightly rouse the senses, like a bit of pepper on your steak.

Peat is a soft organic material consisting of partially decayed plant matter together with deposited minerals. When dead vegetation accumulates in waterlogged soils, a lack of available oxygen creates anaerobic conditions that delay decomposition, and over time peat is formed. Our Flinders peat is made up of vegetation consisting of succulent swampmarsh herbs, tussocks, bordered by coastal heath, tea tree and melaleucas. It spends much of it's time underwater, and provides a very interesting flavour.

We are having a lot of fun experimenting with the flavours at our disposal. Our peating process is what we call "post malting", where we are wetting down our malted Tasmanian barley and smoking it dry with our endemic Flinders peat. The classic alternative to this is the original Scottish method of using peat smoke to dry their barley from the malting stage, where the newly malted wet grain is smoked for up to 20 hours, in large buildings specifically designed for this purpose.

We wanted to see how the flavours of peat from either ends of the globe would work together, so for these batches of whisky, we combined half Tasmanian malt that we had peated on the island, with half Scottish heavily peated malt. The results are phenomenally interesting.The majority of the Flinders peat smoke flavour sits on the back palate, quite earthy, warm and aromatic. Scottish peat on the other hand, is made up of mostly spagnum moss and grasses, and provides to the palate a much more immediate smoke profile, with a dark roasted, sweet, bbq flavour up front. These flavours together have produced a really unique and delicious whisky.

CHECK OUT SOME OF OUR HISTORIC SMOKY WEDDING BATCHES