Last Night's Tipple

It appears from their website that Compass Box has gotten rid of their Eleuthera bottling from their range. You may recall that Eleuthera was their original peaty offering, consisting mainly of a vatting of Caol Ila and Clynelish. It makes sense that they've discontinued this for a couple of reasons. First, it is possible that their sources of Caol Ila or Clynelish dried up. For reasons that I discuss below, I think it unlikely that it was Caol Ila that disappeared, but it certainly is possible that Clynelish did. Clynelish is owned by Diageo, and Diageo recently "promoted" it into its Classic Malts series where previously it had not been extensively marketed as a single malt. It's possible that Diageo no longer had surplus whisky from Clynelish to sell, and Compass Box was unable to find a replacement that would have kept the style of the finished vatting consistent. Second, there's the matter of marketing. Who in the heck knows what to expect from a bottle of whisky named Eleuthera? If I had just seen it on the shelf and had not read about it beforehand, I certainly would not have. The replacement for Eleuthera in Compass Box's portfolio is called Peat Monster. The idea is the same: vat an Islay whisky with a non-Islay whisky to get the characteristics of both Islay and the Highlands. Where Eleuthera used Clynelish, Peat Monster uses Ardmore. Ardmore is an old-style peated whisky where Clynelish is unpeated, so Peat Monster should have a higher phenol content than Eleuthera did; but still the idea is the same. The name, though, is much more marketable, especially in the United States. In recent times, extreme levels of hops have been a big selling point for American microbrewed beer; and the same is true for peat content and Scotch. Peaty whiskies are very popular here, and both distilleries and vatters have taken advantage of this in a big way. Any idiot can tell that a bottle labeled Peat Monster will be peaty, so it's a much easier sell for Compass Box than Eleuthera was. Oh, one more bit of trivia: Compass Box says that the Islay for Peat Monster comes from "the village of Port Askaig, as well as some south shore whisky (as of late 2007)." Port Askaig is on the east coast of Islay very close to Caol Ila. It's also relatively close to Bunnahabhain, but Bunnahabhain rarely produces peaty whisky. I'd be willing to bet that the Port Askaig whisky is Caol Ila. There are three distilleries on the south shore of Islay: Lagavulin, Laphroaig, and Ardbeg. Lagavulin is in extremely short supply, and there isn't much aged Ardbeg available due to its underproduction and neglect for most of the 1990s. I'd bet that the "south shore whisky" is Laphroaig. In any event, it's interesting that Compass Box doesn't explicitly reveal its sources here since they are usually not shy about doing so. I can only guess that their reticence is due to agreements that they made with the distilleries they bought the whisky from.

I haven't had Compass Box Eleuthera in quite some time, and I can't come up with a good explanation for that. The addition of Clynelish makes it less overpoweringly peaty than peated Islay malts are by themselves, and I think that that's a good thing. Peat, at least to my palate, tends to dominate everything else. It's enjoyable enough, I suppose, but I like to taste the malt and the wood influence on the whisky, too. Having Clynelish in the blend allows me to do that. Alas, the bottle is almost gone, and I won't be able to replace it. Of course, even if Compass Box still produced it, I wouldn't be able to replace it since they don't distribute in Texas apparently.

How Peaty is Ben's Scotch?

Ben, you may recall, likes The Smokey Peaty One, one of the vatted malts from the Edrington Group-backed Easy Drinking Whisky Company. You may also recall that the blend for The Smokey Peaty One is as follows (quoted from an e-mail that Dave Robertson, at the time one of the principals in The Easy Drinking Whisky Company, sent to Kevin Erskine, proprietor of The Scotch Blog):

• Caol Ila 5% refill casks - ex American oak bourbon barrels
• Laphroaig 12% refill casks - ex American oak bourbon barrels
• Bunnahabhain 17% American oak sherry
• Bunnahabhain 9% refill casks - ex American oak bourbon barrels
• Highland Park 26% Spanish Oak Sherry butts
• Highland Park 14% American oak hogsheads
• Ledaig 9% refill casks - ex American oak bourbon barrels
• Bowmore 8% refill casks - ex American oak bourbon barrels

As an intellectual exercise, let's calculate the approximate parts per million phenols (the measure of a whisky's peatiness) that The Smokey Peaty One should have based on its constituent parts and then consider why that number may not tell the whole story.

Caol Ila, I believe, it typically peated to around 35 ppm phenols. Laphroaig is around 40 ppm phenols. Unless the Bunnahabhain was from one of that distillery's very rare peated runs, it should be around 2 ppm phenols. Highland Park, as I calculated last month, should be around 9 ppm phenols. Bowmore is around 25 ppm phenols. I have no idea what Ledaig is, but let's assume that it's around 30 ppm phenols. Sooo, the peat level of the finished blend is an easy calculation, given the assumptions that I've made:

ppm phenols (Smokey Peaty One) = 35*0.05 + 40*0.12 + 2*(0.17+0.09) + 9*(0.26+0.14) + 30*0.09 + 25*0.08

This works out to 15.37 ppm phenols. And yet, if I recall correctly, Ben's impression is that it's peatier than some other peaty Scotches that he's tried, in particular, Bowmore Legend, which clocks in at 25 ppm phenols. How can this be? Well, the first possibility is that my assumptions about the phenol content of the constituents of The Smokey Peaty One blend are incorrect. We know, for example, that Bunnahabhain has done runs of an uncharacteristic peaty whisky, and it's possible that some of that whisky is what EDWC used for this blend. Highland Park uses both peated and unpeated malt, and it's possible that they have distillation runs for those two malt varieties and that EDWC got the peaty one (or more of the peaty one than goes into the distillery bottlings of Highland Park). My guess about the peat levels of Ledaig could be off (although it would surprise me if it were higher than I guessed, and it's unlikely that it would make much difference in the final calculation, anyway).

The second possibility relates to the age and treatment of the constituent malts in the blend. The phenol levels that I quote are in the malt prior to mashing, fermentation, and distillation. The phenol levels in the new-make spirit will be significantly lower, and they will decrease with every day that the spirit remains in barrels. The taster's perception of peatiness will also be decreased if newer wood or sherry casks are used to age the spirit since those will introduce flavors and aromas that compete with the peat. There is a good percentage of sherry wood used for The Smokey Peaty One blend, but in all likelihood, the whisky is pretty young. Thus, it might be the case that it is significantly more peaty in character than the pre-distillation phenol levels of its constituent parts might indicate.

This Week's Etymology Lesson

According to Charles MacLean (in his MacLean's Miscellany of Whisky), the word peatreek doesn't mean what you probably think it does.

The Lowland Scots for smoke is 'reek' -- Edinburgh, with its smoking tenements, was once known as 'Auld Reekie' -- and after 1824 'peatreek' came to be used to describe illicit homemade hooch, no doubt a reference to the smoky aroma and flavour of such whisky. In the remote Highlands, where peat was the main (in some places, only) source of domestic fuel, the kilning of malt was done entirely over a peat fire. (p. 105)

So peatreek is synonymous with moonshine, not a descriptor of the aroma of a peaty whisky. In light of this fact, consider Jim Murray's review of Dalwhinnie 15 year old, as quoted in Kevin Erskine's Instant Expert's Guide to Single Malt Scotch:

Nose: Sublime stuff: a curious mixture of coke smoke and peat-reek wafts teasingly over the gently honied malt. (p. 60)

So is Jim Murray aware of what peatreek traditionally has been, meaning that he's using the phrase in his review as an amusing counterpoint to it, or does he assume that peatreek refers to peaty aromas in a whisky?

Last Night's Tipple

I am currently reading Andrew Jefford's book Peat Smoke and Spirit: A Portrait of Islay and Its Whiskies, which is a travelogue cum history cum whisky tasting book of Islay. I have to admit that the chapter in which he describes the terrain of the various regions of the island is not the most interesting thing that I have ever read, but the chapters about the history of the island and its residents and about the seven distilleries still active on Islay are enjoyable.

Ardbeg is the first distillery that Jefford discusses. It lies on the south coast of Islay (along with Laphroaig and Lagavulin), and it dates from 1798. By 1880, it was the most productive distillery on Islay, producing 250,000 gallons of whisky a year. Like most malt distilleries, Ardbeg suffered hard times during the Depression and World War II, closing from 1932-1935 and again from 1939-1945. After the war, the distillery passed between a couple of different owners and was on the verge of closing in 1978 when Allied-Domeq bought it. The problem was that Allied-Domeq also owned Laphroaig and consequently had limited use for Ardbeg whisky -- remember that this was during the period before the emergence of single malts, when all malt whisky was destined for use as blendings; the character that Laphroaig and Ardbeg would bring to a blend are largely similar. The result of this was that Allied-Domeq only ran Ardbeg a few days a year to produce what little they needed, and they allowed the distillery to fall into disrepair. They sold it to Glenmorangie in 1997, and Glenmorangie began a comprehensive (and expensive) program of rehabilitation. Two of the most important of these (at least to the character of the whisky) are the rationalization of the wood aging regime and the standardization of fill levels in the stills. Before Glenmorangie bought Ardbeg, new-make whisky went into whatever barrels happened to be on hand; now, it mostly goes into first-fill or second-fill used Bourbon barrels. Because Allied-Domeq only ran Ardbeg a few days a year, they wanted to maximize their yield for those days and consequently overfilled the stills. This reduces copper contact with the spirit, which in turn makes for a heavier whisky. Glenmorangie reduced the fill level and thus lightened the whisky Ardbeg makes.

Speaking of lightness, that's not a word one usually associates with peated whiskies. But Ardbeg's operation is geared toward producing light whisky. Relatively small fills of the stills has this effect. So does the presence of purifiers on the lyne arms of the spirit stills, the lamp-glass shape of both the wash and spirit stills, and the relatively narrow spirit cuts. All of this increases contact between the spirit and copper, which allows the copper to react to impurities in the spirit and this filter them out. So Ardbeg is something of an anomaly: a lighter, peaty whisky. When you first nose the 10 year old bottling, it's all peat smoke and bacon. That blows off after a little while to reveal a fresh, malty whisky. It was very enjoyable, more so than I remember it.

(Incidentally, my bottle was a gift from Ben and Sara from a few years ago. This means that its contents were distilled during the Allied-Domeq reign; and you can tell it from the extremely pale color of the whisky, which is a result of them using old barrels that had little color left to impart. It will be interesting to try the newer Glenmorangie-made whisky, which should be coming onto the market within the next year or so. This should be more deeply-colored and wood-influenced, lighter, and more peaty due to some innovations that Glenmorangie has brought to mashing that increase the quantity of phenols that make it from the malt to the wash.)

Of Barley, Malt, and Peat

The marketing materials produced for spirits companies commonly appeal to tradition. Our Scotch must be good, the implicit (or explicit) message is, because our master distiller has inherited hundreds of years of knowledge from many, many generations of master distillers. We've been making whisky in exactly this way since God was a boy. Well, it's all a bunch of bull. You wouldn't want to drink what Scotch distillers made in 1800: it would be harsh, unaged, and full of headache-inducing congeners and non-ethanol alcohols. Everything about it, except the site of distillation and possibly the water used for it, would have been different, including the type and size of the stills, the varieties of the barley, the way the barley was malted, the way it was dried, and the types of barrels used. Distillers constantly tinker with everything about their process in an attempt to improve the taste of the whisky they produce, to make the process more efficient, or both.

Take barley, for example. No modern distiller could stay in business using the varieties of barley that were common in Scotland in the 19th century. There simply wasn't enough starch in those barleys to convert into alcohol in an efficient manner today. For time immemorial, man has genetically engineered the crops he plants, but the pace of genetic engineering barley (and many other crops, of course) accelerated dramatically in the 20th Century with the advent of academics and industry-funded institutes whose purpose in life was to make barley better -- more weather- and insect-resistant, higher in starch, higher in potential alcohol, and whatnot. The first barley variety to take Scottish agriculture by storm was Golden Promise, which was developed in the 1960s and withing a few years accounted for more than 90% of barley plantings in Scotland. By the mid '80s, though, it had been superceded by other varieties. Currently, the most prevalent barley variety is named Optic, although it will undoubtedly be made obsolete by something better within a few years. Some "tradition-minded" distillers still use older barley varieties, but the likelihood of those varieties being older than Golden Promise is vanishingly small.

Yeast plus starch equals not much. Yeast plus sugar equals alcohol. Grain has lots of starch and little sugar. Converting that starch to sugar is essential for producing something that can be fermented, which can then be distilled. For Scotch, that conversion is accomplished by malting the barley. This means steeping the barley in water to cause it to germinate, which releases enzymes that convert the starch in the barley to sugar. After germination, the process has to be stopped to keep the barley grains from growing into new barley plants. Not only that, but the malted barley has to be dried to prevent it from rotting. This is done by heating the malted barley in a kiln. Traditionally in Scotland, this was done in kilns fired by burning peat. Now, it mostly is done by coal- or gas-fired kilns. It used to be that each distillery would do its own maltings. This is now rare -- most malt today is now bought from one of the huge commercial malters like Port Ellen.

Peat-dried malted barley gives a distinctive smoky aroma and flavor to some Scotches, most famously those from Islay. The peatiness of a whisky is measured by the parts per million of phenols it contains (I have been unable to find out exactly how the ppm of phenols is measured or whether it is measured in the malted barley or in the finished spirit). Ardbeg, generally acknowledged to be the peatiest of the widely-released Scotches, has around 50 ppm of phenols. Laphroaig has 40 ppm, and Caol and Bowmore have around 35. Not all of the phenols come from the barley -- because water on Islay filters through peat bogs there, whisky made from unpeated barley but Islay water will still have 2 ppm of phenols. It is possible to make something much peatier than Ardbeg, and in fact Bruichladdich has -- an experimental bottling that contains 167 ppm of phenols. I also don't know how this is achieved: do they smoke the barley longer, or do they use a higher proportion of peat-smoked barley? And do the peated malts of today use a certain percentage of peated barley and a certain percentage of unpeated barley? Hopefully I will be able to figure this out soon. Stay tuned...