SEATTLE -Matt Hofmann walks along a small brown pond, the earth of its bank springing underfoot like a muddy mattress.
The ground is, in fact, floating. It’s a peat bog on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, and it’s from here that Hofmann, a co-founder of Seattle’s Westland Distillery, is taking an unusual step for America’s booming spirits industry: making a whiskey whose “terroir” literally involves local dirt.