Maritime peat the Waubs Harbour way.

Since 2019 we’ve been on a journey to create an authentically east coast Tasmanian peated whisky using you guessed it, peat from right here on the coast. It’s been a long and demanding challenge, to be honest, and we thought it’s about time to share a bit of that journey with you.

When we first began, we set out to source local peat to use as a tool to enhance our maritime flavour profile, bringing out nutty, earthy notes, rather than creating a big, smokey peat bomb.

We knew of several peat sources on the coast and set out to take some samples to the lab where we began trialling smoking barley. Unlike Scottish or even Tasmanian highland peat, made mostly of sphagnum moss, peat on the coast of Tassie is a lot richer in oceanside plants like melaleuca, coastal reeds and salty succulents. It quickly became apparent and exciting that the flavour of this peat was unlike any we’d seen before!

Especially interesting was the intertidal nature of some of the peat sources around. Fresh water rivers opening into the ocean mean that the vegetation changes the closer you get to salt water and some of our most interesting samples came in areas which were intertidal or around half way between salt and fresh water.

It was 2020 before we properly took all of our sample work to larger scale where we fully distilled out our first batch of Tasmanian maritime peated single malt on very backyard equipment but more on that later. Stay tuned.