How is peat cut for whisky?

Peat is compacted plant material from permanently wet peat soil, which does not decompose due to lack of oxygen and builds up only very slowly.

According to the IUCN UK Peatland Programme, peat grows 0.5 to 1 millimetre per year. A peat layer one metre thick therefore represents about a thousand years of formation. What comes out of the ground today will not be replenished in any human lifetime.

In Scotland, more than 20 percent of the land area consists of peat. NatureScot calculates that Scottish peat holds 25 times more carbon than all the vegetation of the United Kingdom put together. As long as the peat stays wet, that carbon stays stored.

Peat is partly extracted mechanically in strips from the bog and on the Scottish islands still cut by hand from a peat bank.

With manual work the top layer is removed first. Then blocks are cut from the wall of the peat bank with a narrow spade. Such a spade has its own name and its own shape in each region. The blocks stay lying on the field to dry in the open air, are piled up and then collected into a peat stack.

Mechanical extraction is faster and goes deeper. The top living layer disappears and the exposed peat comes into contact with air, so that it oxidises and carbon is released. According to the IUCN UK Peatland Programme, 95 percent of the lowland raised bogs in the United Kingdom have been lost.

In 2023 the Scotch whisky sector used about 8,000 tonnes of peat, which yielded 64,000 tonnes of peated malt.

The IUCN UK Peatland Programme arrives at 6,000 to 7,000 tonnes a year, which converts to roughly 30,000 cubic metres, and thus puts whisky at about 3 percent of all peat extraction in the United Kingdom. The largest part of British peat does not go to whisky but to other uses.

Peated malt is moreover a small part of all malt for whisky. Most malt is dried without peat; peated malt goes to smoked single malts and to the smoked part of blends.

After germination, barley is dried over a fire, and peat smoke leaves phenolic aroma compounds on the still-damp malt.

Smouldering peat at a relatively low temperature gives much more smoke than an open flame. Moist malt absorbs that smoke better than dry malt, so the smoke passes through the layer at the start of drying. As soon as the malt is dry, the absorption stops.

The smoke content is measured on the malt and expressed in ppm, parts per million. That figure therefore belongs to the malt that was used, not to the whisky in the glass; during fermentation, distilling and years in the cask the phenol content decreases.

Peatlands store a lot of carbon, and extraction exposes that layer, so Scotland is investing heavily in restoration and the industry in more economical use of peat.

The Scottish government set aside 250 million pounds to restore 250,000 hectares of damaged peatland by 2030, with 110,000 hectares as an interim target for 2026. In 2024-2025, 14,860 hectares were restored, 42 percent more than the 10,360 hectares of the year before and thus a record. Since 1990, a total of about 90,000 hectares has been tackled.

In 2023 the Scottish trade body laid down a code of conduct for responsible peat use. It rests on three legs: careful extraction, more efficient working in the maltings, and restoration and management of peatlands.

In de winkel aan de Brink 2 in Bathmen staan 3.897 verschillende whisky’s. Daarvan hebben 495 flessen van 60 merken Islay als streek, en 170 flessen van 89 merken uit 14 landen vermelden peat in de naam. Over de streken verdeeld: Speyside 723, Islay 495, Highlands 456, Eilanden 109, Lowlands 104 en Campbeltown 70. NIX18: wij verkopen geen alcohol aan iemand onder de 18 jaar.