Buy a cask. Wait a decade. Get bottles.
Maturing is cask ownership and nothing else. You buy a numbered cask of spirit at a fixed price, it lies in a bonded barn on this farm for between five and twelve years, and at the end you receive bottles with your cask number on them. You are not investing in anything. We are going to say that a great many times.
Read this before anything else
Maturing is a fixed-price forward purchase of a numbered cask of spirit, delivered to you as bottles. There is no cash return, no profit share, no buy-back, no valuation and no secondary market. It is the same structure as Plotting and it is held to the same line. Plotting is a fixed-price forward purchase of produce, delivered in kind. It is not an investment, there is no cash return, no profit share, and no secondary market. We are emphatic about this because the alternative — paying people a cash share of a harvest they had no hand in managing — is an unauthorised collective investment scheme under section 235 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, and a criminal offence.
The numbers that actually matter.
Six casks, one warehouse, and a set of figures that are arithmetic rather than marketing.
01/ 04
What actually happens to your cask.
It is filled and numbered
New-make spirit off the still at 63.5% ABV goes into your cask on a named day. The cask is stencilled with a number, that number is yours, and it does not move to anybody else.
You get the fill date, the cask number, the wood, the filling strength and a photograph of the head with your number on it.
- Filled at
- 63.5% ABV
- Numbered
- On the day
It lies in bond and loses itself slowly
The barn is an HMRC-approved excise warehouse, which means the spirit sits in duty suspension. Nothing is payable to anybody while it is in there.
It also evaporates. Between two and four per cent of the volume goes through the oak every year, and the strength falls with it, because our warehouse is damp.
- Regime
- Duty suspended
- Loss
- 2.4–4.0% a year
We taste it and tell you the truth
Once a year the cask is sampled and you get the note. Some of those notes are dull. A few of them have been unflattering. We send them anyway, because a cask programme that only reports good years is a cask programme that is lying.
If a cask goes genuinely wrong there is a stated policy, agreed before you pay.
- Sampled
- Annually
- Notes
- Sent whether or not they flatter us
It is regauged, bottled and sent to you
At the end of the window the warehousekeeper measures the volume and the strength, the spirit is reduced to 46% ABV and bottled, and the excise duty falls due on the day it leaves the warehouse.
Then a pallet of bottles turns up at your house. That is the entire return.
- Bottled at
- 46% ABV
- You receive
- Bottles
Three things you can do here.
Take a cask, look after one, or give one away.
Octave, quarter, barrel, first fill, hogshead and an oloroso butt.
Cask number, fill date, the annual note and the years still to run.
The only way a cask changes hands here, and the only way it ever will.
The six, on the shelf.
The Octave
Fifty litres, five years, and the fastest maturation on the list because a small cask is nearly all surface. It…
The Quarter
A hundred and twenty-five litres of first-fill American oak, given six years. The quarter is the size most people should…
The Barrel
Two hundred litres in a refill ex-bourbon barrel, eight years. This is the workhorse of the industry and the cheapest…
The First Fill
The same two hundred litres, but the barrel has held bourbon once and nothing since, and it gets ten years…
The Hogshead
Two hundred and fifty litres in a hogshead — a barrel taken apart, given extra staves and a bigger head,…
The Oloroso Butt
Five hundred litres of European oak that spent its previous life holding oloroso sherry in Jerez, and twelve years to…
The six, compared.
| Cask | Litres | Years | Angel’s share | Bottles | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Octave | 50 L | 5 | 4.0% a year | ≈23 | £1,250 |
| The Quarter | 125 L | 6 | 3.2% a year | ≈59 | £2,650 |
| The Barrel | 200 L | 8 | 2.8% a year | ≈114 | £3,400 |
| The First Fill | 200 L | 10 | 2.9% a year | ≈139 | £4,250 |
| The Hogshead | 250 L | 8 | 2.7% a year | ≈141 | £3,950 |
| The Oloroso Butt | 500 L | 12 | 2.4% a year | ≈371 | £7,850 |
Why it is built this way and not the obvious way.
Four rungs, in the order a solicitor would want them.
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The obvious version is a criminal offence
The version everybody reaches for first is: you buy a cask, we mature it, we sell the whisky, and you take a share of what it fetches. That is an unauthorised collective investment scheme under section 235 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, and operating or promoting one without authorisation is a criminal offence under section 23.
It does not become legal because the cask has your name on it. Asset Land Investment v FCA went to the Supreme Court on exactly that point and the investors owned their plots outright.
Owning the thing is not the same as controlling it.
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So the return is bottles, and only bottles
You pay once, at a price fixed on the day. At the end you receive bottles. There is no cash leg anywhere in the arrangement, no profit share, no pooling with other casks and no formula that converts your bottles into money.
That is not a marketing position we could soften later. It is the reason the product is legal.
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We do not operate a market, quote a value, or buy it back
There is no secondary market here, no valuation service, no "cask index", and no undertaking to buy your cask back at any price. Every one of those things drags the arrangement back towards being a security, and the last of them would make it one outright.
The single exception is gifting, which is a transfer to a named person for no money at all.
A buy-back promise is a return. A return is the whole problem.
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And nobody here says the word investing
Not in the copy, not in the emails, not in the terms. The Financial Conduct Authority and HMRC have both published warnings about cask schemes sold on the promise of a return, and the reason those warnings exist is that a great many people have lost a great deal of money.
This is a farm selling whisky forward. It is a nice thing to own and a poor way to get rich, and we would rather be dull about it than clever.
Tell me when casks are filled.
Casks are filled in batches when there is spirit to fill them with, which is not on a calendar. One email when the next batch opens, and nothing in between.
- One email when a fill opens
- The annual cask notes, if you own one
- No valuations, because we do not produce any
