In 2014 Bill Lumsden, Ardbeg’s Master Distiller, in one of his varied illuminations, decided to bury two ex-Bourbon second fill casks in which their whisky was already maturing, and buried them under peat, as he recounts here.
Today those two casks have produced 456 bottles at an alcohol content of 45.5%ABV, which certainly gives the term ‘peat’ a whole new meaning, but the novelty of this bottling doesn’t end here.
The Ardbeg Fon Fhòid (which in Gaelic means “under the turf”) will in fact be on sale from 19 April (at 4pm London time) on the Blockbar website, where you won’t actually buy the bottle but an NFT (here‘s an explanation of what it is), at the cost of a single Ethereum, a virtual currency worth just over $3,000. The NFT can then be traded or displayed in one’s own virtual bar, or bartered for the actual bottle from the first of December.
This isn’t the first whisky that can be purchased in the form of NFT, on the same site you can find bottles of Glenfiddich, Royal Salute, Dalmore as well as other spirits.
In the meantime, Serge already wrote his opinion.