In Good Spirits: For peat’s sake

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The taste of peated whisky — smoky, briny, medicinal — is an acquired one, but once acquired, it is utterly irresistible.

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“(Peated whiskies) are just really unusual,” says Gordon Glanz, founder and distiller of Vancouver’s Odd Society Spirits. “It’s kind of a love it or hate it thing. I find you want to drink it again. They’re super complex and interesting.”

Now he’s captured those complex flavours in two new whiskies to be released in November, with a third aging in barrels. One is flavoured with Scottish peat, the second with peat from Skagit Valley across the border in Washington.

But it’s the third, which is at least four years from release, that’s the most exciting.

It’s made with sustainably sourced peat from Burns Bog in Delta, putting it among the first truly local peated whiskies produced in this province. Peat is the soil-like material you get when vegetable matter decomposes in the wet, acidic conditions of bogs and fens.

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Local peated whisky has been something of a Holy Grail for B.C.’s distillers. It’s not that we don’t have lots of peat —— we do. It’s just that a lot of it is protected, and more significantly, it’s almost impossible to get a malting company to handle what is available.

Malting is the process of allowing grains to germinate and transform complex carbohydrates to simple sugars and enzymes for fermentation. For peated malt, the grains are also gently smoked over smouldering peat.

“It’s really difficult to do peat in B.C. There’s no malting company that wants to do it because it taints the next batch and there’s a lot of cleaning involved,” Glanz says. By “a lot of cleaning,” he means that every piece of equipment has to be dismantled and scrubbed of every minuscule trace of peat.

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At the same time, it’s easy enough to import peated malt, but under their licensing, craft distilleries can only use locally grown products in their mash.

Some distillers have worked around the restrictions by aging spirits in used barrels imported from Islay, the Scottish island famous for powerfully peated whiskies like Ardbeg and Laphraoig. “It’s quite surprising how much of the smoky flavour comes through, just extracted from the barrel,” Glanz says.

And at least one, Pemberton Distillery, has reportedly malted its own peat, but that’s not a process everyone can do (or wants to).

Glanz, though, has two clever workarounds. The first is finding Skagit Valley Malting, which does a number of experimental maltings, including ones using peat from Washington State.

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The second is putting the peat in his gin basket rather than the mash, which is allowed under the rules. “We use the malt the way you would use lemons for gin,” he explains. “It’s kind of a loophole, but it ends up being an amazing method.”

The smoky-medicinal notes of the peat — a flavour profile known as “phenolic” — infuse the whisky, but don’t affect anything else. It’s such an effective process, Glanz is using it for a series of whiskies he’s making with local smoked woods including arbutus and Garry oak.

Meanwhile, the Burns Bog-peated whisky is slumbering in barrels.

He received the peat through the Burns Bog Conservation Society — which had to remove it for roadwork and decided to put it to good use — before sending it to Skagit Valley.

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Tasting the unaged Burns Bog spirit, though, he was at first a little disappointed.

“I was expecting something super phenolic, oily, seaweed-like, what you get from Islay peat,” Glanz says. “What you get from Burns Bog is way more subtle, with campfire flavours.”

But then the team at Skagit Valley told him: “that’s the taste of the Pacific Northwest.” He laughs. “I’ve come around.”

Unfortunately, Glanz only has a few more runs of Burns Bog peat left. He plans to donate a percentage of the sales from the whisky to the conservation society and says, optimistically, “Hopefully they will give us more peat.”

2022 Cocktail

This cocktail, created by Odd Society Spirits bar manager Mia Glanz, is a postmodern take on the classic Penicilli. She calls it “a drink of healing — honey, ginger and peat encourage recovery.”

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1 oz Odd Society Commodore Single Malt Whisky

0.5 oz peated single malt (such as the Odd Society version, available November 2021)

0.3 oz Tio Pepe fino sherry

0.75 oz lemon juice

0.75 oz ginger-honey syrup (see recipe below)
10 drops angostura bitters

Add all ingredients except bitters to a shaker tin with ice. Shake until chilled. Fine strain into a coupe glass. Add approximately 10 drops of angostura bitters onto the surface of the drink, and swirl with a cocktail pick without dipping the pick deeper than the surface, creating an even layer on the surface of the drink. Serves 1.

Ginger-honey Syrup

1 cup sliced ginger root

1 cup clover honey

1 cup water

Add ginger root to a pot with 1 cup of boiling water and simmer uncovered for 20 minutes. Strain and discard ginger. Add 1 cup clover honey to the ginger-infused water, and stir to integrate. Makes about 2 cups.