Might “Cold Peating” Offer a New Approach for American Single-Malt Whiskey?

In Aitkin County, Minnesota, a couple hours’ drive north of Minneapolis, American Peat Technology isn’t necessarily focused on producing anything for distillers. APT’s product—granulated peat—is a natural fertilizer, and the company aims to sell farmers a successful alternative to environmentally harmful chemical treatments.

Just the same, APT is partnering with one distillery—Brother Justus in Minneapolis—to produce a single-malt whiskey that is peated in a decidedly untraditional way.

Brad Pieper, CEO of APT, says the peat found in Aitkin County is unique. The company uses central Minnesota’s reed-sedge peat—meaning it’s lake peat, made from reeds and sedges—found in low-lying depressions at the bottom of former glacial lakes. Glaciers helped to shape Minnesota, after all, “the land of 10,000 lakes.”

“Reed-sedge peat has different characteristics than sphagnum peat, which is the type of peat that is abundant in Northern Ireland and Scotland,” Pieper says. “Sphagnum peat is very flammable, so it was a great heat source in places like Scotland for many years.” That’s also why people used it to dry the malt for making whiskey.

However, burning peat comes with real environmental concerns—it releases even more carbon into the atmosphere than coal does. “Romance aside,” Whiskey Magazine wrote in 2021, “a dug-up peat bank is a sign of significant environmental degradation.”

Thus, some distillers have been looking into alternatives.

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Peat Infusion

The granulated peat that APT produces is processed—it’s not like the stuff burning in the kilns at many Scottish distilleries. Peggy Jones, APT’s VP of research and development, says their product is more like coffee grains than a horticultural product.

APT dries and granulates the reed-sedge peat that it harvests about a mile from its processing plant. The company says that it harvests eight to 12 acres of peat per year and that it begins the reclamation process to the harvested acres almost immediately. Drying the peat down to 12 percent moisture takes a lot of energy; currently, the company says its main energy source is solid fuel biomass. After drying the peat, the plant pelletizes and crumbles it to produce a granular microbial carrier that meets agricultural specs as a biofertilizer. (It’s also available in powdered form.)

Brother Justus reached out to ask about APT’s peat in 2016, about two years after Phil Steger founded the distillery. APT sent samples, and it took Steger and team more than two years to contact the company again. After their own R&D process, Steger reached out to share what they’d learned, meeting with the APT team in person. He explained that his distillery had landed on what they saw as an innovative process and that they needed to make sure that it was protected.

By the end of the day, Jones says, APT had an agreement to supply peat to Brother Justus. They also had the makings of two processes that would be protected by trademarks—the Torv Rök process and the Aitkin County Process.

Torv Rök—it means “peat smoke” in Swedish—is APT’s granulated peat product that is specifically meant for finishing spirits. The Aitkin County Process, meanwhile, is the Brother Justus method of infusing that product in their Cold-Peated American Single-Malt Whiskey. The whiskey, Steger says, “evokes the northern European heritage of Aitkin County and celebrates Minnesota’s vast and valuable peat resources.”

Infusion leads to a different destination than a whiskey made with peat-smoked malt. Pieper says that because of the iron exchange that occurs during infusion, the peat helps to purify the whiskey at the end step.

“Peat likes to grab onto impurities,” he says. “For example, it’s great at taking the lead out of water.” He adds: “The flavor is different in a cold-peated process. You’ll get more floral notes and more of the actual flavor of the peat, as opposed to the smoky flavor of the burned peat.”

Broader Application?

The teams at Brother Justus and APT say their methods offer unique flavors that are unlike traditional peated whiskey. Pieper says their vision with Torv Rök is to “create a new category, or a category extension in the single-malt category. What is so exciting is that people are tasting a new thing in this whiskey that they don’t taste in other whiskey.”

Eventually, they hope to offer it to other distilleries to produce their own cold-peated spirits. (Pieper even suggests that one day, there may be a cold-peated Jack Daniels, Jim Beam, or Buffalo Trace.)

“I think distillers are going to like the opportunity to offer new flavor profiles to their existing consumers, and we are excited to help them do that,” Pieper says. “We have unique access to material and a unique process by which we can put the material in a format that allows them to cold-peat their whiskey.”

There are other selling points—the environmental angle, for one, as infusion offers a way to incorporate peat into whiskey without burning it. APT also pitches its product as a lower-cost alternative, by volume—it doesn’t take much to get a flavor impact. “Brother Justus uses a fraction of our peat to do this infusion process, compared to what you would have to burn in order to get a peated malt,” Jones says.

Jones says APT has received interest from other distilleries since announcing Torv Rök last year. However, because of their exclusive agreement with Brother Justus, they have been responding, “Yes, but not right now,” she says. “So, the interest is definitely there.”

For Brother Justus, there is also appeal in using a product of the local soil. So, what if a craft distillery in another state wants to use locally harvested peat? Obviously, APT would love to be the company that provides the processing.

“We envision a day where we can pop up our manufacturing facility in a distillery outside of Minnesota and teach them how to infuse their whiskey,” Pieper says. “We can also have the peat sent to us and tested in our lab, manufactured here, and sent back to them. But obviously, it makes more sense to take the party to them, and that’s where we think this will ultimately go.”

However, curious distillers interested in their local peat and the possibilities of infusion may find their own method and character.

“Every peat deposit is going to give a different flavor profile to the resulting whiskey, so that is where the real excitement comes in,” Jones says. “We know a lot about Aitkin County peat, and so does Brother Justus. What does a Massachusetts peat taste like, for example? We are excited to find out.”