Laphroaig

Laphroaig is, for most drinkers, what peated whisky means: the tar, smoke and iodine that people either love or cannot go near. It sits in a small bay on the southern shore of Islay, founded in 1815 by the brothers Alexander and Donald Johnston on what was then family farmland, and stayed in their hands for very nearly a century and a half, until 1954.

It is among the last Scottish distilleries still malting its own barley on the floor — part of what it needs — and it keeps doing so for a specific reason: its own kiln gives a harsher, more creosote-like smoke than malt bought in from elsewhere on the island. The malt goes in heavily peated, and the spirit carries the tarry, iodine character the name is known for. Water comes from the Kilbride reservoir.

When Ian Hunter, the last of the Johnston line, died in 1954, the distillery passed to Bessie Williamson — his secretary, and the first woman to run a Scotch whisky distillery in the twentieth century. It remains one of the few distilleries whose drinkers are formally enrolled: the Friends of Laphroaig, founded in 1994.