We’re the first of December! While December means cold, wet or snowy weather depending on where you live, it also has more festive connotations with Christmas or other end-of-year festive events, and for many people from the 1st to the 24th of December: advent calendars! As the few years before, I’m doing a whisky advent calendar. This year again I couldn’t get a Boutique-y Whisky Advent Calendar (I reviewed one with Ainulindale in 2019) or another one from Drinks by the Dram, but Benjamin, a member of a French Whisky Discord server I’m a member of, and who spends probably way more than me on whisky, offered to do for a few of us our very own ultra limited whisky advent calendar. Five of us members ordered him one, gladly paid 300€ for 25 samples (yep, we have an extra one for Christmas!), and all we know is that the bottles used for the samples go from 150€ to 800€ a bottle… All the samples are just labelled with a number, and each day Benjamin gives us a hint or two in order for us to guess what it is. But first, where do advent calendars come from?
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What is peat
One of the multiple steps before distilling a malt whisky is malting the barley and one of the steps is drying the malt. For that, you need heat in kilning to dry the malts. Peat has been traditionally used as a cheap fuel for kilning (and heating homes) in Scotland in the past, especially in the regions where coal was hard to come by and expensive, like the islands, Campbeltown and the Northern Highlands. Now, the question is: what is peat?
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