Peated whisky could be banned within five years. That is not my opinion, but the verdict of Alastair Collier from a company called A Healthier Earth, whom I interviewed while researching a piece for Forbes about a potential replacement for peat. And here is the thing that surprised me most: this is not some fringe campaign.
The Scotch Whisky Research Institute and Heriot Watt University are both actively hunting for peat alternatives. So let us unpack this in the lightest way possible, because the reason peat is at risk is probably not the one you are thinking of.
Historically, the Scotch whisky industry has used a tiny fraction of the peat extracted in the UK, around 1% of the total. But peat has become political across horticulture and agriculture. You can no longer buy peated compost at a garden centre, and from 2028 agriculture will be barred from using it too. The arithmetic then becomes brutal. Without changing its consumption at all, the industry’s share of UK peat use leaps from 1% to 40%.
The optics are damning: an industry flavouring a drink with nearly half the nation’s peatlands. In a warming world where climate taxes and emergencies feel increasingly plausible, that is a headline waiting to happen.
The deeper problem is not the burning, but the storage. UK peatlands hold three billion tonnes of carbon, more than the forests of the UK, France and Germany combined. I think of it like a balloon. Dig up a peat bog, and you pop it, releasing all that trapped carbon into the atmosphere. You can glue the balloon back together with restoration projects, but you cannot put the air back inside. Peat grows at one millimetre a year, so a single metre dug out represents a thousand years gone. This is the inconvenient truth: peatlands are simply not renewable.
Yet here is why I am optimistic rather than alarmist. Peated flavour is chemistry, not alchemy. Phenols, guaiacol and creosols attach to the barley husk during malting and carry through production. Reproduce that chemical signature, and you reproduce the smoke. Earlier this year, researchers at Heriot Watt and the SWRI published a peer-reviewed paper showing that spruce wood delivers a lightly smoked profile with a chemical fingerprint remarkably close to peat, and no off-notes. This was only their second trial. Imagine ten.
And before anyone cries “tradition,” remember that Scotch has cheerfully abandoned floor malting, paxarette, direct firing and ancient yeast strains. Peat is no more sacred than any of these. So no, I am not calling for a ban. But I do believe peated whisky becomes a logical target the moment the climate becomes more political. Look out your window tonight. What do you think?
To find out more about the subject, check out my latest YouTube video.
Read the full article at Why I Believe Peated Whisky Is On Borrowed Time & Why Drinkers Shouldn’t Be Worried
