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Comment by ocfnash | Hacker News Reader

I'm Irish; many of us are ashamed of how we treat our bogs. We have tiny peat-burning power stations which:

  * Are extremely polluting
  * Destroy a unique ecosystem
  * Are loss-making

all for the sake of "protecting" a few local jobs.

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>all for the sake of "protecting" a few local jobs.

a lot like people that give out about fishing it appeals to petty nationalism.

Is all peat created equal? How are we going to make whiskey when the peat is all gone?

I suspect the requirements of the whisky industry for peat are probably pretty tiny - as far as I know its only the smaller higher end distillers that actually burn peat.

Peated whisky is a specialty product, with rather small production scales compared to unpeated Highland and Speyside malts. So yes, it is quite sustainable, given the regrowth rate.

Many years ago when I was a student I had a summer job working in one of the huge industrial scale maltings that supplied quite a few of the popular whisky brands - I can't remember if they produced peated malt but I do remember their analysis lab having gas chromatography equipment for analysing such things.

Not all whisky is peated. At the current rates, there is enough peat for hundreds of years of whisky production, even if no new peat was formed, and it regrows at around 1mm/year, which is quite sustainable, if we stop using it for power generation.

All of the makers of peated whisky are committed to protecting the peat, as far as I know. And their peat usage is absolutely miniscule compared to its current use in power generation.

Bruichladdich has a good summary: https://www.bruichladdich.com/faq/is-peat-sustainable/

I believe peat use is rare in the malting for Irish Whiskey. More common in Scotland but still not the majority.

But presumably you could burn other fuel and get a similar result. The traditionalists would be grumpy though.

It is quite rare, but not nonexistent. I believe there's only about three to five distilleries who produce or will be producing peated Irish whiskey, at least one of which isn't yet in production at the moment.

> But presumably you could burn other fuel and get a similar result

I'm not so sure about that. Peat smoke has a quite distinctive smell.

Peat is a renewable resource, like hardwood forests. It grows, but it is very slow so it's more expensive than other renewable resources. Someone here quoted 1mm/year but in active areas it's closer to 1 inch (26mm)/year

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