This Whisky Tastes Like 10,000 Years of DEATH

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]This smells like every time my dad tried to prank me and hand me the Spatoon to drink out of as a kid.

[00:00:04]>> Get out of my face. That's good.

[00:00:06]>> This bottle, it's the most polarizing [music] whiskey on Earth. And what they're actually tasting is 10,000 years compressed into coastal bogs since the last ice age. [music] That's what pey means in whiskey. Ancient death and decay in a glass. [music] It's a love it or hate it whiskey. So, we're going to pour it blind because whenever you understand piness, it opens up a whole new door to flavor. Even though a lot of people would rather lick a tire than walk through that door.

[00:00:33]>> Let's try calling you. H >> Why did a photo of you with bedroom eyes come up on the phone? [laughter] >> What do we do?

[00:00:41]>> That those were your words.

[00:00:43]>> Oh, yeah.

[00:00:43]>> Sure wish my glass wasn't empty.

[00:00:47]Oh, I see. It's a green bottle. I just saw the tip.

[00:00:50]>> WAY TO GO. [laughter] >> SO MUCH.

[00:00:55]>> M. I'm getting a little peey. Smells pey. Pete. Pretty Pete. Smells nice.

[00:00:59]>> This like a peyiness in here.

[00:01:01]>> Not uh crazy peey, but uh pretty uh respectable amount.

[00:01:07]>> So, we're thinking malty scotchy range.

[00:01:10]Scotchy.

[00:01:10]>> Feels a little fruity.

[00:01:12]>> Little candy pear.

[00:01:13]>> I'm getting like a little bit of licorice or peppermint, something like that. It's very crisp, which I like.

[00:01:18]Kind of also smoky at the same time.

[00:01:20]>> It's got smoky elements to it. Little bit of sugar. Sugary vanilla.

[00:01:25]>> Almost a meatiness to it.

[00:01:27]>> I'm usually not a big pea guy, but I I kind of like the way that one smells.

[00:01:31]>> Like a leather sandal that's been walked on. Oh yeah, baby. That's nice.

[00:01:35]>> Brian is in defeat.

[00:01:36]>> It makes me. [laughter] >> NOW Pete exists because trees [music] don't. On the Scottish islands, there wasn't enough timber to burn for fuel.

[00:01:45]So for centuries, people burned the ground. Instead, they cut [music] slabs of waterlogged, halfdecomposed earth from bogs, dried them in stacks, and used them the way that the rest of Europe used firewood. And when whiskey distillers needed to dry their molted barley, they burned what they had. That smoky [music] flavor from the Pete wasn't a choice. It's just the only option they had for fuel.

[00:02:05]>> It smells like uh wintergreen tobacco, which is what my my dad dipped growing up. So now what I tell people is it smells like my dad's breath.

[00:02:11]>> It's given scotch, but I also don't know much about that. I'm more of a bourbon person. Maybe it's cuz I grew up around it, but this smells like every time my dad tried to prank me and hand me the spatoon to drink out of as a kid.

[00:02:20]>> Oh my gosh.

[00:02:21]>> It's a good gag.

[00:02:22]>> This has to be an aisle of scotch, right? It's got to be, dude. There's no way it's not.

[00:02:26]>> Most peted whisies taste smoky. This one tastes like a first aid kit. The difference is what's in the ground. The Pete bogs under this distillery sit close to the coast and they're saturated with thousands of years of decayed seaweed. Different dead things make different smoke. That's what you're tasting.

[00:02:43]>> What is that?

[00:02:44]>> It's interesting. It's not bad. Ooh, it's very uh almost wormwoody. There's a bitterness to it.

[00:02:49]>> It's nice.

[00:02:50]>> Get out of my face. That's good.

[00:02:52]>> It's friendly. Uh is very approachable.

[00:02:54]Pe >> finally. Gosh, it took us a really long time to get here.

[00:02:59]>> It's kind of sweet. It's sweeter than I thought it was going to be.

[00:03:02]>> Less sweet than I expected.

[00:03:03]>> There's almost a sweetness in there, which is kind of crazy.

[00:03:07]>> It's more sweet like licorice and kind of cherry. A little bit of cherry like hard candy or like cough medicine. less oily, but that smoke like a cinnamony apple smoke >> like a honey ham coming on.

[00:03:19]>> Not quite ashy.

[00:03:20]>> That wormwoody thing and the peey thing, which I usually describe as flavors I don't like, but that's not terrible.

[00:03:26]>> It tastes amazing.

[00:03:27]>> The Pete under this distillery is coastal. So, you got like the decayed seaweed woven through the moss and the heather for millennia. So, the iodine, the medicinal burn, the [music] antiseptic character, that's the ocean.

[00:03:39]So you're not just tasting smoke, you're tasting which dead things made the smoke and where. [music] And this distillery owns roughly a thousand acres of Pete bog, their own private supply of stuff.

[00:03:50]>> You've got all these grassy roots and funguses decayed in here. And that's what makes the Isa Pete unique. The very kind of earthy kind of medicinal flavors. It tastes like you're on a beach, just you in the seawater and [music] and a dolphin winks at you and a shark comes over, [music] fistbumps you, and we're all just like having a good time. You know what I mean? You know what I mean, though? And you find a cool seashell and it says, "What's up?"

[00:04:16]>> It's not my jam. I probably wouldn't like gravitate to this as my daily drinker necessarily. This feels like an 80 proofer to me.

[00:04:22]>> 80 proof.

[00:04:22]>> I'm going to go with 90. I think the proof. Well, it's really hard for me to guess it when there's so little in my glass.

[00:04:29]>> There's still something in there.

[00:04:30]>> It's tough [music] to I wish I had more to really [clears throat and laughter] really figure that out.

[00:04:36]>> She's vetoing going any further unless she gets some more whiskey.

[00:04:40]>> Parker, I CAN'T EVEN I CAN'T EVEN make an ACCURATE ASS. I CAN'T EVEN I just claim on the >> I need some because I can't even give an accurate >> This is unnecessary description.

[00:04:51]>> Oh god.

[00:04:52]>> Don't worry. I got this.

[00:04:55]>> What?

[00:04:57]>> What was the question?

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[00:06:52]>> Is this one yours?

[00:06:53]>> They're both mine.

[00:06:54]>> This is >> I'll take that one. You don't need it.

[00:06:56]You don't have a long giraffe neck.

[00:06:58]>> Now, there's a rival distillery that sits less than a mile down the road.

[00:07:02]Same island, same general climate. At one point, they installed identical stills, same copper, same dimensions.

[00:07:07]The whiskey [music] came out different, though. So you can have the same process but with a different Pete source. The fuel you use for that smoke is going to have a tremendous impact on the flavor and character profile of that whiskey.

[00:07:18]But how does it show up in the [music] glass?

[00:07:20]>> It's a little weird, but kind of like it.

[00:07:22]>> I'd have to give this like a 10.

[00:07:24]>> If I wasn't looking for the super dense stuff, I'd give it a nine.

[00:07:28]>> I won't go 10. That's crazy. Nothing's perfect. I give this a nine.

[00:07:32]>> A seven. It's kind of enjoyable. It's interesting. There's got a lot going on.

[00:07:36]one of those classic uh like I like the girl but she's not incredibly hot. So, she's a seven. She's good.

[00:07:40]>> Great personality. [laughter] >> Whenever it comes to the hate it crowd and there's a lot of people that work in the industry, there's a lot of people that are totally new to whiskey that just cannot get on board. This whiskey has been dividing rooms since [music] any of us were born. And the people who love it often take it beyond love. It becomes like devotion.

[00:08:00]>> This is what whiskey should taste like.

[00:08:02]There's going to be a lot of people that disagree with me there because [music] for whatever reason they don't know how to taste things. Well, >> wow. Wow. [laughter] >> I mean, you know, rule, >> let's just really get tagged for that.

[00:08:15]>> Rule Rule one is the best whiskey you like to drink the way you like to drink it.

[00:08:20]>> Unless you don't like what Brianna likes.

[00:08:22]>> Correct. [laughter] >> I've never met someone who keeps this on the shelf sometimes. It's either always there or it's never there. So, what do you think 10,000 years of geology costs per bottle?

[00:08:34]>> Scotch is always a little more expensive anyway.

[00:08:36]>> I think this costs $167.

[00:08:42]>> I'm going to say 150 bucks.

[00:08:44]>> $40. $30.

[00:08:45]>> I've seen this for about $45 to $65.

[00:08:48]>> 50 is reasonable. I'd put it on my shelf for 50.

[00:08:50]>> We paid 70 for this one because we needed one for [music] the episode.

[00:08:54]>> 70 bucks. Okay.

[00:08:55]>> Not bad at all.

[00:08:56]>> I mean, that tracks with scotch.

[00:08:57]>> Very curious. Get on in there.

[00:09:02]>> It is Leafroy. I knew it. Sort of.

[00:09:05]>> Leafroy.

[00:09:06]>> It's the Lafroy. Okay. Yeah, it's the 10.

[00:09:08]>> Yeah.

[00:09:09]>> This is Leafroy tin from Isa. The most polarizing single malt in the world.

[00:09:13]>> I've had Leafroy in the past and thought it was terrible. This is not bad today.

[00:09:17]>> Oh, interesting.

[00:09:17]>> It's come around, >> dude. Hell yeah. Finally.

[00:09:20]>> So, my Leafroy is the cash strength, >> of course.

[00:09:22]>> Now, Leafroy was founded around 1815 on the south coast of ISA. And the story of how it got here involves a rival who tried to destroy [music] it. Two brothers, Donald and Alexander Johnston, built a distillery on a stretch of coastline where the Pete bogs were thick with decayed seaweed and the water ran through them on its way to the sea. It's medicinal, iodineheavy, aggressive. The Johnston's didn't [music] design that character. The ground under their feet designed that for them. Less than a mile down the coast, a distillery called Logavulan. They had been watching. And Logulan's owner, Peter Mackey, did what people do when they want something. He tried to control it. He forced a blending agreement that required Leafroy to supply whiskey for Logavulan's [music] blends, effectively restricting Leafroy's ability to sell under its own name. Leafroy took Mackey to court and won. The [music] agreement dissolved and Mackey's response was to block Leafroy's water supply to try and cut off the killed ride stream [music] that fed the distillery.

[00:10:17]>> Resources, [laughter] >> resource battles.

[00:10:20]>> Point is, way back in the day, Logulan's owner wanted that character. He even installed stills built [music] to the exact same specification. Same copper, same shape, same dimensions, but the whiskey came out [music] different. It's good. I love Logan, too, but it was definitely different. It wasn't the copy that he was going for. The rivalry doesn't exist today, but it was it was >> [music] >> uh spicy back in the day.

[00:10:40]>> There's a lot of non-scotch drinkers that have been coming in and they can't get past the band-aid note, which I totally understand. There is a band-aid note. Like, who are we kidding? It's in there. But if you didn't need a couple band-aids growing up, >> did you eat band-aids?

[00:10:53]>> You peed in the pool and you ate band-aids.

[00:10:55]>> There's always a band-aid in the pool.

[00:10:57]>> I drank pool water. Of course I ate band-aids every now and then.

[00:11:01]>> It's nostalgia. It's the pee pool water with band-aids in it. This is why you like it.

[00:11:05]>> It's delicious.

[00:11:06]>> We've learned too much about you.

[00:11:08][laughter] >> We're done.

[00:11:09]>> The most polarizing whiskey on the island is also the one that out sells all of them. You can buy a handful of their neighbors and compare them to each other. That character, that Pete smoke, [music] that flavor, that geology expressed in liquid between Arbeg, Kila, Logulin, that's going to taste different >> for a single malt that I'm learning, you know, I'm learning to produce and then to drink. This is something like interesting.

[00:11:32]>> You guys are out there. You've been dialing in the smoke shed where we're smoking with different fuels. Oh, yeah.

[00:11:38]And that [snorts] type of smoke profile.

[00:11:40]I mean, that is a unique, weird, interesting kind of smoke.

[00:11:45]>> We're actually Pete smoking right now.

[00:11:47]It's not Scottish Pete. It's Ireland.

[00:11:49]>> Compressed bricks.

[00:11:50]>> Now, 200 years later, it's the bestselling peted whiskey and the sixth bestselling single malt globally. But all of that aside, is that going to go on your shelf?

[00:11:59]>> Better than the scotch I have on my shelf right now. And for 70 bucks, that's not ridiculous. I probably will pick up a bottle of that. But yes. Okay.

[00:12:05]75. I will put this on my shelf.

[00:12:06]>> I mean, it already is kind of >> It's already on your shelf.

[00:12:09]>> Yeah, that's cash. It's already on the shelf.

[00:12:11]>> Absolutely. It would. Are you kidding me? It's already on my shelf, but I'll also add this one to it. No, >> the marketing team launched a campaign called opinions welcome and they captured every grimace and gag.

[00:12:21]Everybody saying it's it tastes like hospitals and burning tires and like licking a cigar smoking walrus and they put the hate quotes front and center. So from what I've seen with most people isn't [music] where you start your whiskey journey, but for a lot of people it's where you arrive if you ever arrive. [music] Some people explore for years and end up here and it becomes the bottle that's always on their shelf.

[00:12:42]Some people try it once on a friend's recommendation and never pick up another bottle of any whiskey again because they think that's what all whiskey is like.

[00:12:49]Which is interesting because as much as I like Leafroy, I do think [music] it's possibly the most damaging whiskey experience for newcomers who try this on a recommendation and think, "Oh, hell no. I'm not a massochist. I'm not drinking that ever again." Whiskey, all of it is gross. And thousand years of decay and decomposition, that's what started all of it. And then a neighbor who couldn't copy it tried to [music] destroy it instead. Two centuries of people fighting over the same stretch of coastline and a marketing team that decided being hated was not a bug, it's a feature. What do you think about peted scotches? What do you think about Leafroy in the comments? You know what?

[00:13:26]I also expect a lot of people to be like, "Lafroy was my first whiskey and I loved it." Because you guys are freaks and I love you.

[00:13:33]Cheers.