An appreciation of Peat over at Slate Magazine.
I look forward to an upcoming Scotch tasting with friends, and am normally no fan of heavy peat. But, open minds need open tongues...and this article puts me in an island mood.

I don't mean to suggest that island whiskies taste like rotted fish. It's just that the ones that I'm swilling these days owe much of their flavor to decay. To wit, they are permeated by peat, which someone in my favorite New York whisky bar--d.b.a. at 41 1st Avenue in Manhattan's East Village--once explained to me is "the halfway point between dung and coal." (The attribution for that line is strangely indecipherable in my notebook--one of those nights.) Peat, according to Charles MacLean in his definitive 1997 book Malt Whisky, is "the acidic, decayed vegetation made from bog plants such as sphagnum moss, heather, sedges and grasses--the composition varies according to the peat bog's location." The peat bogs close to the sea, he goes on, become "saturated with salt spray, and in some cases contain strands of seaweed, relics of time when they were under water."