Since 1870 we’ve lived and breathed malting. With this passion and expertise, and by combining traditional and modern techniques, we create an impressive range of malted and non-malted products, including several unique and exclusive barley malts.
There is nothing more we love than talking to brewers and distillers so if you have any questions, or would like to arrange a call with a member of our team, please feel free to get in touch – we would love to hear from you!
The kiln operators at Crisp’s Portgordon maltings, in the heart of Speyside, are trained to watch for one thing above all else: smoke, not flame.
“You don’t want flames,” says David Griggs, Crisp’s Technical Director. “What you’re looking for is lots of lovely white smoke passing through the grain bed.” A slow, steady curl, thick and unhurried, is the sign that the peat furnace is doing its job.
After observing the process over many years, Griggs calls it “a bit of a black art.” Run the same process twice, he says, and you can get two different results. The moisture in the peat matters. The moisture in the grain matters. Fan speed matters.
Somewhere in that variability is a malt that ends up in whisky made an ocean apart, on the Isle of Skye, but also in a Breton distillery near ancient peat bogs, in the Derbyshire hills of England, and in the mountains of central Idaho.
At Portgordon, “peated malt” isn’t a single product so much as a single process, calibrated to order.
Green malt is split after germination. The larger portion goes to a plain kiln. A smaller portion goes to a dedicated peating kiln fed by an adjacent peat furnace. What determines the final specification isn’t a different malt or a different barley, but how much of that peated portion gets blended back in, and to what target, measured in parts per million (ppm) of total phenol content.
“We’re cutting the peated product down to 50 ppm, our heavy peated level,” Griggs explains, describing a process he likens to high-gravity brewing: produce something concentrated, then dilute it to the customer’s specification by blending with plain malt. Every batch of peated malt that leaves Portgordon, whatever the label, traces back to that same split.
Inside the kiln, that calibration is the product of a carefully controlled cycle. Peat smoke is introduced at the start of the process, and air temperatures rise gradually as drying proceeds, with the finished malt brought down to a tightly managed moisture level. Control isn’t exercised through in-line measurement. There’s no meter reading phenol levels as the malt dries. It comes down to the furnace operator’s read of the fire, confirmed only afterward, in the lab.
That lab work matters because “peaty” isn’t a single flavor. Total phenol content, measured in ppm, is really a sum of distinct compound families.
Phenols themselves are soft and sweet, almost medicinal. Cresols are sharper, more antiseptic. Guaiacols carry the smokiness most people associate with peat, along with notes of spice, vanilla, and even tobacco.
Crisp’s lab determines total phenol using a colorimetric method after steam distillation. High-performance liquid chromatography, or HPLC, can also be used. This technique separates a sample into its individual chemical components, breaking the total phenol figure down into its constituent parts. It’s a level of detail that starts to explain why two malts with identical ppm figures can taste different.
Crisp’s peat comes almost entirely from a single source: the St. Fergus moss workings in Aberdeenshire, operated by Northern Peat & Moss and covering roughly 100 hectares, not far from Portgordon itself. Extraction there uses a deep-dug method sometimes called “sausage cutting,” in which tractor-driven machines cut slits beneath the surface and draw up long pipes of peat, which are laid out to dry before being cut into briquettes for the furnace.
That single-source relationship shows up clearly in the numbers. HPLC analysis comparing peated malt made from St. Fergus peat and from Islay peat reveals real differences in compound ratios, expressed here in milligrams per kilogram, which is equivalent to ppm:
Source: Crisp Malt
St. Fergus peated malt shows higher levels across nearly every compound, including notably larger shares of guaiacol and cresol relative to its total. Griggs is careful not to overstate the case. Distillation, he notes, has the final say in how much of that character survives into the glass. But there’s a real basis for what some in the industry believe: that peat, like grapes or barley, carries something of the place it comes from.
David Roussier didn’t need to see that chemistry to reach the same conclusion. As distiller at Distillerie Warenghem in Brittany in northwestern France, he chose Crisp’s Speyside peated malt specifically over Islay for the distillery’s Yeun Elez single malt, a decision rooted entirely in geography and taste.
“The Monts d’Arrée have far more in common with Speyside,” he says, referring to the granite highlands and peat bogs near his distillery, for which Yeun Elez is named. Peat extraction is prohibited in France, so authenticity meant looking abroad, to producers who have honed the craft over generations. “We decided to work with people who truly have a tradition in peating barley,” Roussier says.
What he built from that malt is distinctly his own. Rather than lean into the earthy, vegetal character common in Scottish peated whisky, Warenghem uses higher distillation cut points to coax out a drier, more elegant profile. “I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have the same profile with Islay peat,” he says. Yeun Elez has since won Best French Whisky at the World Whiskies Awards three times.
Where Roussier used peat to build something unmistakably his own, Max Vaughan at White Peak Distillery in Derbyshire used it with deliberate restraint.
Peat was part of the plan from White Peak’s earliest days in 2016, chosen in part because no one else in the young English whisky scene was working with lightly peated spirit. “We wanted the background complexity and flavor from peat, but, as a brand, we didn’t want to be characterized as peated whisky,” Vaughan says.
The distillery’s seven-day fermentations further shape that character. It’s long enough, Vaughan notes, that the team has developed a clear preference for how it changes the spirit, even at White Peak’s comparatively subtle peat level.
The result is a whisky where peat is present but not always consciously identified by the drinker, which Vaughan considers a feature rather than a shortcoming. “It’s just a component of the flavor profile.” The approach has paid off. Wire Works Bourbon Barrel recently won Best World Whisky 2025 and Whisky Exchange Whisky of the Year 2026.
On the Isle of Skye, Torabhaig Distillery takes the opposite approach: peat as the foundation rather than an accent. Deputy Operations Manager Kieren Roberts and his team target 75 ppm, among the highest levels in the industry, shaped through long fermentations and a high cut point into the distillery’s house style.
For Roberts, sourcing malt from the mainland rather than the island itself isn’t a compromise on identity. It’s simply a matter of scale. “It’s not really viable to grow and malt barley at the scale we would require for our operations on the island,” he says. “There’s an economy-of-scale issue to consider. Can’t have it all.” The focus, he says, has always been on what Torabhaig does with the malt once it arrives, not on where the raw peat itself was cut.
What matters more to Roberts is reliability, especially given how remote the distillery is. “Crisp has been great in their ability to provide us a constant and consistent supply of highly peated malt,” he says. “This is at the core of all our production, so it needs to be available.” That consistency has been matched by Crisp’s flexibility whenever logistical issues have arisen from the distillery’s location.
“Crisp’s malt is a great building block for us to work with,” Roberts says.
Four thousand miles west, in Ketchum, Idaho, Josh Strobel is building something that didn’t really exist a decade ago.
Warfield Distillery‘s Gently Peated is roughly half Crisp’s 50 ppm peated malt, blended with Idaho-grown barley and a touch of chocolate and caramel malt, landing the finished grist around 25 ppm. Aged in new charred American oak rather than the ex-bourbon casks common in Scotch production, it drinks like “a smoked Scotch, but with more cask character,” Strobel says.
American Single Malt Whiskey is still a young, loosely defined category, which Strobel sees as an opportunity rather than an obstacle. It’s a chance to build something recognizably American rather than an imitation of Scotch.
What keeps the malt itself reliable, batch after batch, is consistency. “You don’t see a whole lot of drop off from one batch to the next.” For a distillery just beginning to scale production, that predictability is what makes ambitious plans, including a full trailer of Crisp’s peated malt bound for Idaho, possible in the first place.
Peat is not an infinite resource, and that reality shapes how Crisp talks about sourcing it. Scotland’s peatlands are a significant carbon store, but when degraded, they shift from carbon storage to carbon release. The Scottish government has moved in stages toward restricting peat sales, beginning with retail horticulture and expanding toward professional use.
Malt whisky production, though, occupies a small corner of that picture. The malting industry accounts for less than 1 percent of the UK’s annual peat extraction, a figure that has supported the case for an exemption as broader restrictions take shape. For its part, Crisp frames responsible sourcing primarily as a matter of efficiency: extracting the most phenolic value from the least amount of peat burned, an approach reflected in the newer kiln design at Portgordon, built to maximize smoke retention in the grain bed.
Four distilleries, two continents, one malt. What connects a dry, fruit-forward whisky from Brittany to a smoke-forward Skye single malt is not a shared flavor profile. It’s a shared starting point, shaped by hands and judgment as much as by process, then handed off to distillers who each take it somewhere entirely their own.
As Vaughan puts it, working with peat is ultimately a question every distiller has to answer for themselves. “There are options around how to achieve the final peated spirit… plan for lots of time in the early days to work out how you want to integrate all these elements.”
What Crisp offers isn’t an answer to that question. It’s the raw material, precise enough for each distiller to find their own.
Whether you’re building a house style defined by peat or looking to add a subtle layer of smoke to your next release, Crisp’s team can help you find the right specification for your spirit. Get in touch with Crisp Malt to learn more about sourcing peated malt for your distillery.
About the Author
Jesse Bussard is a writer and a marketing communications professional based in central Pennsylvania. Through their business, Cowpunch Creative, they collaborate with agricultural, craft food and beverage brands, adding the punch they need to stand out.
Find out more about Jesse Bussard here.
Back to top
