It’s aged primarily in bourbon barrels, but its final three years are spent in oloroso casks, where the scotch takes on its sherrylike layers.īest Aged: Glenfarclas 25 Year Old at Drizly Without them, you have malt whisky in its purest form - something that, no matter how peaty you like your Scotch, is well worth getting to know.Best Overall: The GlenDronach Revival at DrizlyĪged in the Highlands in Pedro Ximénez and oloroso sherry casks, it starts off with a spiced fruit nose.īest Under $50: Aberfeldy 12 Year Old at DrizlyĪn everyday pour, this whisky offers cherry cola aromas with a mouth-coating, mid-palate sweetness that finishes in bittersweet, woody tannins.īest Under $100: Bowmore Darkest 15 Year Old at Drizly Peat in the water would hide the subtlety, and smoke would smother it entirely. Contrast that with the Auchentoshan 18 ($110), which is from the Lowlands, near Glasgow, and has no discernible peatiness, allowing this rich yet subtle old whisky to present itself almost like a bourbon: grainy, with all kinds of spice notes from the barrels in which it slumbered for so long - mocha, leather, a hundred other things - and a long, smooth finish. Take the Tobermory 15 ($69) from the western island of Mull: a rich, complex whisky - dark and chewy yet not heavy or overpowering, with a 'Scotchiness' from the peaty water. Most peated-malt whiskies are thus essentially double peated via the smoked grain and the funky water, and many an ostensibly unpeated whisky still betrays its influence, sometimes markedly. And since much of the Highlands is occupied by peat bogs, the groundwater is often percolated through the stuff to the point that it comes out of the tap with a brownish tint. Malt whisky is made of three things: barley malt, yeast, and water. Peat, you see, has another way of sneaking into your glass.

And yet there's also a hint of something that's not supposed to be there: While it's not smoky, there's nonetheless an unmistakable whiff of peat. It's brinier, less ingratiating than the Glengoyne, with hints of tropical fruit and butterscotch. Or try the new Rocks bottling from Islay's Bruichladdich distillery ($45), which, unlike most of its neighbors on that peat-rich island, specializes in whiskies made from unpeated grain. The Glengoyne is like pure distilled honey - soft, creamy, harmonious. While a big peated single malt such as a Bowmore from Islay or a Springbank from Campbeltown is inarguably a magnificent whisky, they can't do what this does. Taste the 10-year-old Glengoyne malt ($46) from the southern edge of the Highlands, just north of Glasgow, and you might just wonder why any distiller would still use peat. There are, however, even fewer that go bareback and use none at all. Nowadays, very few producers outside the peat-bound island of Islay use more than a small proportion of smoked malt in their whiskies, opting rather to use it as an accent. Once the 20th century rolled around and modern transport reached all but the remotest parts of the Highlands, distillers could bring in Lowland-style unpeated malt or indeed malt smoked to any level they wanted. In the industrialized southern Lowlands, they had plenty of hard coal, which produces a light, almost odorless smoke. (Indeed, the distinctive aroma of burning peat pervades many Scottish and Irish country towns to this day.) Since the flavor of smoke is impossible to distill out, early Scotch whisky was redolent with it. And peat is about as smoky as a fuel can get.

Most of the Highlands being remote, treeless subarctic moorland, that toasting had to come from the only fuel they had: dried peat. To make malt whisky, you need malt, which is made by toasting just-sprouted barley. If not for peat, they wouldn't have had any whisky at all. Yet, ironically, the doughty Scots who first introduced peat to firewater did so only because they didn't have any other choice. Kerr defined it in his 1905 magnum opus, Peat and its Products - 'a spongy vegetable substance composed generally of mosses and aquatic plants in different states of decomposition.' For many Scotch drinkers, the smoky muskiness it gives a whisky has become the drink's defining characteristic rather than the quality of distillation or how well it's matured. The way Scotch drinkers light up when you say 'peat' these days, you'd think it was some sort of tropical fruit of almost magical deliciousness rather than - as W.

Scotch no junkit