How do you approach being a guest blogger? There are different ways of going about it. You can show off something deeply technical and demonstrate everything you know. Try to make the reader feel the same kind of reverence for your expertise that they feel for the OG blogger.
Yes, that’s one way of doing it…
Or you can write about poo.
That’s more fun.
Frida wants me to introduce myself first, so I suppose that’s what I’ll do.
Even before I was old enough to drink alcohol, a glass was pushed under my nose.
“Can you smell vanilla, butterscotch and apples in this?”
I wasn’t allowed to taste until much later, and when I finally did, I wasn’t particularly impressed. So although I’ve been training my sense of smell since my mid-teens, my own nerdy interest didn’t really take off until my mid-twenties.
If you’ve listened to any episode of the podcast Malt med mummelbyxor, which Frida, Sarati and I started together, you’ll already know that I’m fairly unpretentious. Trying to maintain any kind of façade in that podcast is pointless. Frida saw right through me immediately. Life takes its turns, and here I am: Cecilia, 35 years old, happily childfree, writing about poo.
Most whisky enthusiasts are already familiar with the idea of peating malt, or with distilleries experimenting with different types of wood. What fewer people know is that there are distilleries around the world that use animal dung when smoking their malt.
At this point, you might be thinking: that sounds a bit disgusting.
Historically – and in some places still today – animal dung has been used as fuel for heating homes and for sealing buildings.
In Iceland, it is nothing unusual to smoke food using sheep dung. The landscape is harsh, with lots of exposed bedrock and poor conditions for trees to grow or peat to form. Instead, dung is collected, dried and left to mature before being used as fuel. A not entirely unknown distillery called Flóki then uses this fuel to smoke their malt.
In Namibia, peat and trees are scarce – but elephants are plentiful.
Elephants digest their food slowly, which means their dung contains around 80–90% plant fibre. In other words, what Ondjaba uses to smoke their grain is only almost poo.
On the Australian island of Tasmania, we find Belgrove Distillery. The entire distillery is run as a closed-loop system and is known as one of the most sustainable in the world. Their best-known whisky, Wholly Shit, is made from rye grown on the farm. The rye is dried using dung from the farm’s sheep, which in turn are fed with draff – the spent grain from the whisky production.
I’ll be honest: I don’t know exactly how much or how often a sheep defecates. But if I say one to two times per day, and that the conversion from food to manure takes somewhere between 12 and 48 hours, I’m probably not too far off. Right?
Now compare that with peat, which is a finite resource that takes thousands of years to form.
With those parameters in mind, it’s not hard to see that there may be an environmental advantage to using dung as fuel.
But if we set aside availability and environmental aspects for a moment – what actually happens when grain is smoked using this kind of fuel? Are we going to get sick? Die from listeria?
You can relax. The high temperatures involved both during combustion and in the subsequent distillation process kill any potential viruses or bacteria. The whisky is, of course, perfectly safe to drink.
Dung generally burns at lower temperatures and produces more smoke than wood. Roughly speaking, it works like this:
Dung contains a lower proportion of carbon, which means the fire doesn’t burn as hot. Even when dried, it retains more residual moisture, meaning that much of the energy from the fire is spent evaporating water, which further lowers the temperature. Because of the material’s density, the fire gets less oxygen, and together with the lower temperature this leads to incomplete combustion. Instead of a clean flame, large amounts of soot and smoke are produced. Dung also contains a high proportion of volatile organic compounds – volatiles – which are released as smoke as soon as the material is heated, even before it actually ignites with a flame.
It is precisely this smoke that is desired when drying grain. The smoke contains a wide range of compounds that adhere to the grain and, in turn, give the whisky its character.
The seasoned enthusiast might now be thinking something along the lines of: how does this translate to the PPM scale? The short answer is: it doesn’t. In whisky, PPM refers to the phenol content of the malt – compounds that dominate in peat smoke. Smoke from other fuels has a very different chemical composition, where phenols are neither as dominant nor as evenly distributed. Comparing these types of smoke using the PPM scale therefore becomes fairly meaningless.
So what can you expect from a dung-smoked whisky? Not something disgusting. Not something dangerous. Rather a softer, sweeter smoke with earthy, herbal and slightly barnyard-like notes.
Whisky has always been about place, availability and creativity. About what you have around you, and how you choose to use it. Sometimes it’s peat. Sometimes wood. And sometimes… poo.
So what do you think? Will we see more distilleries using dung-smoked grain in the future – or is it simply too controversial for us here in the West?
