As our third round of samples begin to wind down, I saved my third supplied sample for last in hopes it would be the best of the three I offered up. Flaughter is distilled by highland region distillery, anCnoc. It is the second in their peated series, following Rutter, and preceding the recently announced PeatHeart. This one is rated at around 15ppm and is a healthy 46% ABV. It’s NCF’d and has no color added. The nose is pretty weird. The first thing that popped into mind was Diacetyl. It is a condition usually associated with wild and sour craft beer. It is basically a failure of the yeast to completely consume the bacteria, introduced during fermentation to produce the intended sourness, and leads to an unwanted, rancid butter flavor to the beer. That is what popped (lol, pun) into my head at first whiff. The butter smell from an unpopped bag of microwave popcorn. This smell, mixing with the damp fireplace smoke, had my nose reeling and not knowing what the heck to expect on the palate. Well, the first sip revealed lots of peat smoke and a harsh bit of what I’d describe as grilled lemon slices. Like if you were grilling fish with lemon on the top and it slipped off and down onto the hot coals. It also seems apparent that the source whisky here is relatively young and anCnoc decided not to blend in some with a bit of age on it to mellow the younger spirit. It all leads to a lingering, harsh finish. Speaking of finish, some peaty earthiness seeps through along with some wet-blanket-thrown-across-a-smoldering-fire smoke. It’s a bit too harsh and a briny, sea salt flavor dries onto the tongue and lingers until you wash it away. Overall, with all of its faults I think it could’ve been saved and turned into a solid dram had they just used some older malt to calm the entire whisky. A little bit of mellow would’ve went a long way here. As it is, it’s tough to give this one a good score. I’d like to give this some time and come back to it much later, but like Sweet Brown said “Ain’t nobody got time for dat!” (Google Sweet Brown if you aren’t familiar). She’s an American treasure. 3 stars. Cheers.