Laphroaig

Laphroaig tastes like nowhere else, and its drinkers tend to fall hard. Made on the south shore of Islay since 1815, it still malts a portion of its own barley over a peat fire cut from the distillery’s own beds, giving the smoke a medicinal, iodine-rich signature people describe as anything from seaweed to sticking plaster to a peat bog on fire. It was famously the only Scotch to enter America through Prohibition, sold as a medicine, and nobody argued.The house style is uncompromising: tarry smoke, brine, seaweed and a dry, ashy finish, softened in the sherried and cask-strength expressions. The 10 Year Old is the reference point, the Quarter Cask its bolder cousin. Loved and loathed in equal measure, rarely met with a shrug.