Lagavulin's younger peats are the sensible way onto Islay

Lagavulin is the heavyweight of Islay's south coast, and it prices like it. The brand median sits at $127, which is a serious number for a distillery this size, and every bottle here is asking more than the room around it. That is not an accusation. Big, oily, medicinal peat this good is not cheap to make or to mature, and the market knows it. The question worth asking is not whether Lagavulin costs more than its neighbours, because it always will, but which of its bottles asks the smaller premium for the same distillery signature.

Two of them make that case well, and they sit at opposite ends of the price ladder.

Take the 8 Year Old first, because it looks like the obvious value and the numbers complicate that a little. It is $127, which is the cheapest way into the distillery on this shelf. Against its ten nearest matches, though, near $102, it is running about $25 over, roughly a quarter more than comparable bottles. So the entry Lagavulin is the affordable one in dollars and the dearer one in premium. What you get for it is the distillery stripped back to its bones: sharp, young, coastal peat, iodine and sea-spray, a medicinal edge, and a surprising sweetness underneath that keeps it from being austere. It is bright and a little raw compared with the older expressions, and for a lot of drinkers that directness is the appeal. If you want to know what Lagavulin actually tastes like before the years round it off, this is the honest introduction.

The 11 Year Old Sweet Peat is the more surprising value, and it is the one the model likes best of the two. It is dearer on the tag, $165, but its matches sit near $105, and it is only about $10 over them, roughly ten percent. For a brand that charges what this one does, a bottle sitting that close to its peer group is close to a bargain in relative terms. The "Sweet Peat" name is doing honest work in the glass: the same smoky, peated, faintly meaty Lagavulin core, iodine and butterscotch, but with a rounder, sweeter edge from its cask treatment and a touch of sherry-like dried fruit riding underneath the smoke. It is friendlier than the 8 without going soft, and it is the one I would pour for someone who finds young Islay too fierce but still wants the real thing rather than a watered-down version of it.

Set the two side by side and the useful surprise is that the cheaper bottle carries the steeper premium. The 8 is the lower ticket and the bigger markup over its rivals; the 11 is the higher ticket and the gentler one. If you are buying on price alone, the 8 wins. If you are buying on value for the money, judged against what comparable Islay malts cost, the 11 is quietly the smarter buy, and it happens to be the more forgiving dram as well.

What binds the two together is the thing that makes Lagavulin worth the fuss in the first place. Both are built on the same maritime peat signature: that big, oily, smoky core with iodine and sea-salt running through it, the flavour of a distillery that sits right on the water on Islay's south shore. The 8 shows it young and sharp, the 11 shows it rounded and sweetened, but neither hides it, and neither dilutes it into something polite. This is peat that tastes of a place, and the reason drinkers pay up for the name is that very few distilleries anywhere put the coastline in the glass this vividly. The premium is real, but so is the thing you are paying for.

A word on what is not here this week. The bottle that made this distillery famous led a recent piece of ours, so I am keeping it out of the spotlight rather than serving the same anchor twice in a month. It remains the reference everyone measures the range against, and nothing above changes because it is sitting this one out. The point of the week is that the two bottles either side of it are worth your attention in their own right, and one of them may be the better value than the icon it flanks.

So the buying advice sorts itself cleanly. If your budget is the deciding factor and you want the least you can spend to drink real Lagavulin, the 8 is that bottle, going in with eyes open that you are paying a fair-sized premium for the privilege of the youngest, brightest version. If you want the best return on the money and a slightly gentler pour, spend the extra and get the 11 Sweet Peat, which asks the smallest premium of anything on this shelf and rewards it with a rounder, sweeter, more generous take on the house style. Either way you are drinking one of the most recognisable peated malts in the world, and either way you are paying up for it, because that is simply the price of this address.

The lesson of the desk is one Islay teaches over and over. The famous bottle is rarely the only good bottle, and it is often not the best value. Lagavulin has two here that prove it, and the dearer of the two is the one I would carry to the counter.