Update! If you want to see our tasting notes click here.

Well the time has come for the final release of Ardbeg Supernova. The Supernova is advertised as the peatiest of whiskies. There is some debate over this however due to the Octomore expressions from Bruichladdich, some of which claim to have peat levels higher than 200ppm. However, being all whisky geeky I’d like to say that measuring peat levels is a tricky thing. Most distilleries measure the peat levels of the malted barley instead of the final spirit.So how much of the peat makes it through to the actual whisky is contested and highly variable.

There are also different methods of measuring peat in malt which can return very different results. So really it’s hard to say which is peatiest without taking the whiskies to a lab and running them through a barrage of tests. But all that aside, does it really matter? There are some who say that humans cannot differentiate peat levels beyond a certain ppm and that the doubling of ppm’s does not equate to a doubling of peaty experience on the palette. It is also well known that as whisky ages it loses peat concentration. Whisky Science has a good article on this.

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