Can whisky go peat-free?
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Cutting peat is delicious – if you do it, old-style, with a spade, it comes out of the ground in thick slabs as dark and dense as chocolate cake. Carbon-rich and slow-burning, it’s been used to kiln malted barley for Scotch whisky for hundreds of years, imbuing the spirit with its signature smokiness. It’s also a vital part of the ecosystem. The International Union for Conservation of Nature describes it as “critical for preventing and mitigating the effects of climate change, preserving biodiversity, minimising flood risk, and ensuring safe drinking water”. And it’s the planet’s biggest land-based carbon sink; the destruction of peatland accounts for almost 5 per cent of all man-made CO2 emissions.
As gardeners reading this will be all too aware, the use of peat-based compost has become increasingly taboo – and there are now moves being made to ban it outright in the UK. At the same time, the whisky industry’s use of peat is also coming under greater scrutiny. Just one per cent of all peat extracted in Scotland is used for whisky – but that’s still 8,000 tonnes of peat a year. And peatland is glacially slow to regenerate, growing just one metre every thousand years.
There is no quick fix. All that digging must be offset through the restoration of degraded peatlands elsewhere in the country. It’s estimated that up to 80 per cent of Scottish peatlands are in bad shape as a result of over-grazing, drainage and afforestation. These dried-out bogs must be re-wetted and replanted with moisture-retentive sphagnum moss, the organism that helps promote the acidic environment that bog flora and fauna need to flourish.
Since 2021, Suntory Global Spirits – which owns the Islay malts Laphroaig and Bowmore – has committed to invest $4mn in five such schemes around Scotland. Other distillers to follow suit include Isle of Arran Distillers and Highland Park on Orkney. The world’s biggest Scotch producer, Diageo, will launch a new £5mn peatland restoration project later this year. Working in partnership with the RSPB, it aims to restore 3,000 hectares of degraded Scottish peatland by 2030. The Scotch Whisky Association (SWA) will also publish an updated blueprint for more sustainable peat use by the end of 2025.
“A lot of work is being done on making kilning [of peat] more efficient, so you get the same phenolic content [ie, smoky character] with less peat,” says Alasdair Day, master distiller and co-founder of Isle of Raasay Distillery, which is part of a new Peatland Restoration Cooperative delivered by Caledonian Climate and supported by organisations including the SWA and NatureScot.
Another way to reduce peat use without sacrificing smoke is to age in ex-peated whisky casks. This is what the farm-to-bottle distillery Lochlea in Ayrshire did to create its latest malt, Smoke Without Fire.
Scottish peat-smoked barley is used by distillers across the world – if you’ve enjoyed a smoky malt from the US, Australia or Japan there’s a strong chance what you’re actually savouring is Scottish peat bog. But increasing numbers of distillers are now experimenting with other types of smoke in a bid to give their whisky a flavour that’s more vernacular and to cut their carbon footprint.
New Zealand’s Thomson Whisky makes a great single malt smoked with manuka wood (it also makes a peated whisky flavoured with peat from New Zealand’s South Island). Stauning Smoke from Denmark features local heather. Icelandic distillery Flóki has a single malt smoked with sheep dung, which is better than it sounds: think hints of hay, sheep wool, lanolin and grassy, sun-warmed fells.
Despite some excitable headlines, the Whisky Exchange’s buying director Dawn Davies doesn’t think we’ll see a ban on peated whisky any time soon. “It is such an iconic style,” she says. “Smoky will forever be in the whisky portfolio.” Perhaps, though, the smoke of the future will be a little bit more mindful.
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