@gthoma14 Nice find! Sometimes you can lucky with little bottle shops in woop-woop. As long as the corks are good they should be fine.

@cascode I discovered a 2009, and 2007, covered in dust in a regional bottle-o a week back (and a lonely Elijah Craig 12)...but you're right, I think that'll be the last I see of them

@gthoma14 Thanks - I had a bottle of the 2007 a while back and it was very good, but I think long unavailable. The 2009 seemed to disappear very quickly out here, so I must chase up this new one. Cheers.

@cascode I did wonder if maybe it was some charred barrel coming through. I picked it up a few weeks back at Dan Murphy's, it seems to have just rolled in (up in the Newcastle area anyway). The 2007 and 2009 I found difficult to find.

@gthoma14 Just noticed you're in Oz - did you find this locally? I've not seen it anywhere.

Bruichladdich isn't a peated whisky but it's made on the same equipment that is used to produce Port Charlotte and Octomore. Many distilleries that make both peated and unpeated whisky produce the peated expressions just before the equipment is taken off-line for cleaning and maintenance so that smoke won't affect subsequent unpeated runs. However sometimes there can be residual smokiness that will get into the next run of unpeated whisky (you notice this occasionally in Hazelburn, Sprinkbank's unpeated line). So it's not impossible that one given batch of Islay Barley could have a faint smokiness, but it would be vanishingly small and I'd be very surprised if most people noticed it. The other thing that folks sometimes mistake for faint peat-reek is barrel char, and the Islay Barley is partly aged in ex-bourbon barrels. I'd hazard a guess that the particularly clean, crisp lemon-barley profile of Islay Barley lets a bit of charcoal from the barrel show through.

@LeeEvolved maybe I've spent too much time with peat I can't help tasting it in eveything now

@gthoma14 - it’s probably more subliminal. They see Islay Barley and think they taste peat. Lol

@LeeEvolved yeah, that got me confused as to why some had mentioned they'd picked up a peat note in an unpeated scotch. I almost thought so myself, but it turned in to charred lemon/barley sugar lolly smell and, with that, the idea of peat was gone.

Bruichladdich uses Port Charlotte-branded whisky and the Octomore series for their peated stuff. If it isn’t branded as PC there shouldn’t be any peat used for these bottlings. Any traces of peat you experience are really only possible from the water supply or storage of the casks on the island- and it should very faint or even undetectable.