American PEAT

Part One: Sustainable Traditions

Written by SAILOR GUEVARA

Photos by ELIESA JOHNSON

When I think of peat, I find myself thinking of Scotch whisky and Scotland. However, as it turns out the United States has peatlands in spades, and distilleries are beginning to use that American spirit of innovation to utilize peat in their whiskey-making process.

As a point of reference, Scotland has two distinct topographic regions, the Highlands in the north and west and the Lowlands in the south and east, which also gave birth to two kinds of bogs. In the Highlands' harsh climate, not many trees can grow. In the 19th century, while people living in other parts of the world could simply gather branches or chop up wood for fuel, the Highland crofter needed to cut his fuel out from the ground; thus, peat became a traditional fuel in Scotland. On the southernmost island in the Inner Hebrides, barley is dried over a peat fire, infusing it with a distinctive aroma and taste.

Now back in the United States, we are beginning to see more smoked and peated whiskies coming to the market. It’s exciting to see distillers begin to utilize what grows naturally in their geographic region, whether it be a specific grain or the method to dry their grains.

Two distilleries immediately came to mind as I sought more information on this subject, and as I dug further in the enormity of it became clear, so this will be a two-part story.

First, I will share the story of one distillery at the forefront of a new whiskey-making approach in the American Great Plains.

I traveled the snowy roads of Minneapolis, Minnesota, to meet with Phil Steger, the founder of Brother Justus Distillery. Brother Justus was a Benedictine monk who lived in Central Minnesota during Prohibition and The Farm Depression of the 1920s. Justus believed that no earthly power could take away their right to make a living from their labor and the fruit of the land.

The Brother Justus Distillery is a stunning facility built with vision. As I walked through the distillery, one big question held my focus: the flavor of their cold-peated whiskey. I wanted to know more about Minnesota peat and understand Steger's process for this whiskey.

The vast peatlands of northern Minnesota are some of the most exciting landscapes in the US and one of the state's most extensive ecosystems, covering more than 10 percent of the state.

Steger gave me some background on Minnesota peat. “Minnesota peatlands were formed approximately 8,000 to 10,000 years ago when the glaciers covering the state melted at the end of the Ice Age and left behind vast shallow lakes with no outlets to the sea. As they slowly soaked into the earth, they stripped the waterlogged soil of oxygen and turned them highly acidic. The seeds of reeds and sedges and the spores of mosses blown in on continental winds took root and grew, taking carbon dioxide out of the air and turning it into their carbon-based bodies. When they died at the end of the growing season, they didn't undergo the quick rotting that takes place in ordinary, oxygen-rich, pH-balanced soils. Instead, they slowly dissolved over centuries, with their complex, solid carbon mostly intact. Minnesota peat is generation after generation of these plant communities laying their bodies down to form this spongy organic turf, which yet contains a physical record of every plant that grew in that spot since the end of the Ice Age when wooly mammoths walked the Earth.”

At over six million acres, Minnesota has more peatlands than any other state except Alaska. The extensive, mostly unaltered peatlands of northern Minnesota are recognized regionally and internationally for their expansiveness and spectacularly patterned landscape.

Steger said his motivation to create a peated whiskey and his chosen methods reflected his desire to conserve peat as a millennia-old carbon sink, and to taste the subtle details reflecting the local ecology that are layered into the peat

“The traditional method of peating burns peat to smoke the grain during malting at the very beginning of the whiskey-making process,” he said. “All peated whiskeys in the world, except ours, are made this way. I respect the historical reasons for using this method in Old World single malts, but it was one tradition I believed didn't need to be — and shouldn't be — replicated in the DNA of American Single Malt whiskey.”

Steger went on to explain why utilizing Minnesota peat was so important. “I wanted to use Minnesotasourced peat in our whiskey to experience the taste of our terroir. I also felt a very powerful responsibility to the land itself. Because we were the first to use this resource in whiskey, I knew we would establish an important precedent.”

We discussed the ecological impact of utilizing American peat as well. “Traditional peat-smoking turns up to 10,000 years of carbon sequestration into greenhouse gas and air pollution. It also reduces the unique, organic history and flavor of the land to smoke, literally. “I didn't want that precedent to set Minnesota's ancient carbon sink and ecological chronicle on fire. It was imperative that the first single malt made with Minnesota peat keep peat's carbon in solid, organic form so it could go back into the ground and not into the air. It was also imperative that it preserve and impart into the whiskey the unique herbaceous and earthy signature of the plant communities that built up the bogs over thousands of years.”

Brother Justus utilizes a unique process and approach to peating their whiskey, infusing the peat directly into the whiskey as a finishing element, Steger explained.

“Oak-finishing and maple charcoal infusion are traditional to whiskey, going back a few centuries. Using peat in whiskey predates that by many centuries, perhaps a thousand years. But peat-finishing and infusion were never done until we did it,” he said. “That's because the spongy, super-absorptive properties of natural peat make it nearly impossible. We had to invent our way to it by working closely with an ingenious Minnesota peat supplier, American Peat Technologies.”

Steger believes this approach represents a change all distillers could benefit from. “I think the future of peated whiskey in America — and the world — is cold-peated, or peat-finished, whiskey using the method we invented and the improvements that are sure to come. A remnant of traditional burned-peat, or peat-smoked, whiskey will, and I think should, survive in the venerable distilleries of Scotland that have kept this tradition alive. But it shouldn't be widely replicated elsewhere, and I don't think it will be. Traditional peat-smoked whiskey is already under significant regulatory and consumer pressure. New craft distilleries, including in Scotland and industry observers, openly question whether peat has any future in whiskey.”

I echo Steger’s sentiments as I travel West to another distillery that has been at the forefront of American peated whiskey for some time now. In the next part of this story, I learn about Washington’s Westland Distillery and how their partnership with Skagit Valley Malting has created innovative malting while crafting a product uniquely Western Washington.

Sailor Guevara,