Lo-Fi Explainer: Peat

You take a drink of scotch and the inside of your mouth tastes like a wood fire. Someone tells you that's the peat. Sure, you say, but what the hell is peat? Where does it come from? And how does its taste get into your whisky?

 Let's take your questions one by one.

What is peat?
Peat is, to explain it very simply, burnable dirt. Dead boggy plants build up and partially break down over time, smooshing down under their own weight. It's used as a fuel source, because you can dig it up (see the brownie-looking illustration on the top of this article) and dry it out, and it burns! It's used kind of like like trees, but for bogs/fens which do not have trees. And you probably wouldn't make a house out of it (though some people do).

Formula for peat. Hashtag math.

Where does peat come from?
Peat forms and is farmed all over the world - not just Scotland, as you might think from drinking whisky. Ireland! England! Finland and Russia use it as a significant fuel source.

And yes, there is peat in the United States and Canada. We can have our own peated whiskys here in the good ol' U.S. of A. using our own peat. If we want.

How does peaty taste get into my whisky?
Well, it's not really the taste of peat itself. If you licked some peat, it would not taste like yummy whisky smoke flavor. Instead, what you're tasting is peat smoke particles.

How that burny flavor gets up in there.

Most typically, peat flavor bits get into the whisky-making process during the malting of barley. Peat fire was traditionally used in Scotland as the heat source for malting house floors. The smoke permeated the floors and stuck in the barley. That smoky peat flavor from the barley makes it through the distillation process and into the whisky you drink!