Seaweed and Smoke Make for a Whisky World First From a Vancouver Island Distillery

Barley. Peat. Seaweed. It’s an unassuming trio of raw ingredients, but in the hands of Graeme Macaloney—a Scotsman with a PhD in fermentation engineering—nature meets alchemy, culminating in a world’s first spirit with distinctive terroir and merroir. Sugar Kelp-Infused Peated Whisky is the latest release in The Peat Project, a limited-edition series of single malts he’s making at Macaloney’s Island Distillery & Twa Dogs Brewery in Saanich on Vancouver Island. (Macaloney is also behind the Northwest Whiskey Trail).

The distillery’s pair of Forsyths copper pot stills have only been put to work since 2016, but Macaloney has long-range goals: to distil the finest single malt in North America—possibly worldwide. And he’s well on his way. Macaloney’s Kildara Signature Selection won the award for World’s Best Pot Still whisky (and Best Canadian Pot Still) at the 2023 World Whiskies Awards.

Melding elements from land and sea in spirits isn’t entirely unconventional. But Macaloney has coaxed complexity from humble ingredients, staying true to his Scottish heritage while amplifying West Coast terroir. “I’m all about traditional methods,” he says. Like distilling in pot stills and using both malted and unmalted barley in the acclaimed Kildara.

Photographs by Elli Hart

Macaloney grew up near Glasgow, close to the Black & White whisky factory, where he worked as a summer student. He considered joining the industry but came to distilling the long way round. After attaining “credentials up the yin yang,” as he puts it in his lyrical accent, he “got into fermentation but making antibiotics… so Big Pharma.”

That career led him to Canada, but the longing to make whisky never left. Instead, it ignited the idea to start his own business. After turning to crowdfunding, “eventually we ended up with 700 Canadian whisky geeks all invested in us to make it happen.”

Before bottling anything, Macaloney brought on a consultant: Dr. Jim Swan, the so-called Einstein of Whisky. “He interviewed me for the position, by the way,” he adds. (Swan passed away in 2017.) Mike Nicolson, a third-generation master distiller, rounds out the trifecta of Scotsmen whose fingerprints have contributed to the operation’s success, where experimentation meets precision and consistency.

Genuine terroir hasn’t been properly explored in whisky-making, Macaloney says. “I think peat is the essence of terroir; it’s literally the soil. You’re farming it, the smoke is getting laid on the barley, that smoke is transferring into the whisky, and it comes out in the glass.”

For the sugar-kelp whisky, peat is sourced from the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, lending the smoky elements that “peat heads” clamour for, typical of Islay, one of Scotland’s five whisky-distilling regions. A test sample from the first-ever peat smoking Macaloney sent to a lab in Scotland hit the range of 45 to 50 parts per million of smoke that Islay distilleries often aim for. Macaloney, however, isn’t aiming to replicate the same spectrum of flavours as much as honour traditional smoking methods.

In Scotland, he recalls his family digging seaweed into potatoes growing in peat beds and also eating dried dulse as a snack. “So this is part of my culture.” That played into his plan to produce whisky with a “more profound terroir,” and partnering with Vancouver Island-based Cascadia Seaweed. “When I chewed on the sugar kelp, it tasted sweet,” Macaloney says. “And then when you burn that, the smoke, the smell, is incredible… you’ve got the beach at low tide.”

After the new make, or unaged spirit, that comes off its pot stills is infused with smoke and seaweed, it’s matured in Dr. Swan’s bespoke Portuguese red wine shave-toast-rechar barriques that lend layers of red berries, caramel toffee, and deep oak notes on the nose, along with those salty seaside aromas. On the palate is medium peat, sweet pipe tobacco, oak, and spices, developing into flavours of wet coastal forest, smoked oysters, and a hint of salt. The whisky is bottled at 46 per cent ABV.

The next two offerings in The Peat Project will showcase elements both near and dear to Macaloney’s heart, including peat imported from Islay. The ever-enterprising scientist, who dabbles in genetic genealogy, discovered a Macaloney clan in Nova Scotia and asked to test their DNA. They’re cousins. “Our common ancestor, my seventh great-grandfather, was an an Ìleach [man of Islay],” he says, sounding incredulous at discovering this 200-year-old lineage.

Macaloney’s also found a local (and legal) peat source south of his adopted home on Vancouver Island, ready for his third experiment in uncovering the essence of whisky-making terroir—and possibly another award-winning spirit—bringing old and new worlds together.

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