Every year, a fifth of a barrel walks out through the wood.
The trade calls it the angel’s share, which is charming, and it means you are paying for whisky that will never exist. Over eight years a two-hundred-litre barrel loses forty litres. That is a hundred and fourteen bottles you have bought and will not receive.
The loss, across the six.
Small casks lose faster because the ratio of oak to spirit is worse. Long windows lose more because the loss compounds. Both of those work against you at once.
What is actually happening.
Oak is porous. Water and alcohol both move through it and evaporate off the outside of the cask, and what you lose is decided by the humidity of the room they are sitting in.
In a dry warehouse you lose proportionally more water, the volume falls and the strength goes up. In a damp warehouse you lose proportionally more alcohol, the volume falls and the strength comes down. Our barn is a stone building with an earth floor and no heating, so it is damp, so our strengths fall — a cask filled at 63.5% comes out somewhere between 53% and 59.5% depending on how long it had.
There is a second, smaller loss that nobody mentions in the brochure. Somewhere between four and six litres soak into the staves and stay there. The Americans call it the devil’s cut. You are paying for that too.
A damp warehouse takes your strength. A dry one takes your volume. There is no third kind of warehouse.
Bottles bought against bottles received.
| Cask | Litres in | Years | Bottles if nothing was lost | Bottles you get | The angels take |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Octave | 50 L | 5 | 99 | ≈23 | Fifty litres, five years, and the fastest maturation on the list because a small cask is nearly all surface. It is the cheapest way in and it is also the one that loses the highest proportion of itself. You get roughly seventy-five bottles and the angels get twenty-three. |
| The Quarter | 125 L | 6 | 247 | ≈59 | A hundred and twenty-five litres of first-fill American oak, given six years. The quarter is the size most people should take: enough wood contact to do something interesting, not so much spirit that you are still drinking it in 2050. |
| The Barrel | 200 L | 8 | 394 | ≈114 | Two hundred litres in a refill ex-bourbon barrel, eight years. This is the workhorse of the industry and the cheapest bottle on the list, because refill wood gives less and therefore costs less. It is also the most forgiving cask we have, which is why it is the one we recommend to people who have never done this before. |
| The First Fill | 200 L | 10 | 394 | ≈139 | The same two hundred litres, but the barrel has held bourbon once and nothing since, and it gets ten years rather than eight. It costs eight hundred and fifty pounds more than the refill barrel and it gives you twenty-five fewer bottles. We would rather put that sentence at the top of the page than bury it, because it is the whole argument: you are buying the spirit, not the volume. |
| The Hogshead | 250 L | 8 | 493 | ≈141 | Two hundred and fifty litres in a hogshead — a barrel taken apart, given extra staves and a bigger head, and put back together larger. More spirit, proportionally less wood contact, and the lowest price per bottle on the list at a shade over eleven pounds before duty. |
| The Oloroso Butt | 500 L | 12 | 986 | ≈371 | Five hundred litres of European oak that spent its previous life holding oloroso sherry in Jerez, and twelve years to do something with it. It is the most expensive thing on this site by a wide margin, it gives you six hundred and fifteen bottles, and it will not be ready until well into the 2030s. Take it only if you genuinely want six hundred and fifteen bottles. |
The warehouse, and why it loses what it loses.
The building
- Construction
- Cotswold stone, slate roof, earth floor
- Heating
- NoneWhich is the point — a heated warehouse matures faster and worse
- Racking
- Dunnage, three highCasks on their sides, on wooden runners
- Temperature swing
- Roughly 2°C to 26°C across a year
The consequence
- Humidity
- High, most of the year
- So you lose
- Proportionally more alcohol than water
- So the strength
- Falls, by between 4 and 10 percentage points
- And the volume
- Falls by 2.4% to 4.0% a year, compounding
What nobody puts in the brochure
- Devil’s cut
- 4–6 litresSoaked into the staves and never coming out
- Position in the stack
- Bottom casks lose leastAnd we do not let you choose
- Regauge
- Measured, not modelledThe warehousekeeper’s figure is the figure
The one thing evaporation is good for.
Losing a fifth of the volume is also how the whisky gets good. Concentration is doing half the work: the spirit that stays behind has spent eight years in contact with oak that is giving up vanillin, lactones and tannin while the cask breathes.
The two effects cannot be separated. There is no way to keep all two hundred litres and also have eight-year-old whisky, and any operator who implies otherwise is describing a cask that has been kept somewhere it should not have been.
So the loss is not a defect being managed. It is the process, and the price you paid already assumes it.
- Lost
- 17–25% of the volume
- Gained
- Everything that makes it whisky
The questions this page gets.
No. It would mean sealing or heating the warehouse, and both of those produce worse whisky. The loss is priced in already, which is why a fifty-litre octave costs twenty-five pounds a litre and a five-hundred-litre butt costs under sixteen.
No, and nobody insures it, because it is not a loss event — it is the ordinary behaviour of wood. The insurance covers fire, flood, theft and physical damage to the cask.
If the regauge comes in materially below the expected outturn stated on your cask page, the shortfall policy applies and you choose the remedy. It is written out in full on the page about a cask going wrong.
They are in the cellar, on your cask, with the fill volume, the last regauge and the years still to run.
What happens if the cask is simply bad.
Some casks are. Ours have been. Here is what happens, agreed before you pay.
