Everything people ask about a cask.
Grouped into the money, the whisky and the law, because those are the three things people worry about and they worry about them in that order.
The money.
The cask price, once, on the day you buy it. That includes storage and insurance for the whole window. Then nothing at all until the spirit leaves the warehouse, when excise duty and VAT fall due.
No, and there will not be. It is inside the purchase price. If you have been quoted one somewhere on this site it is an error and we would like to know about it.
£32.79 per litre of pure alcohol, at the rate set on 1 February 2025, plus VAT at 20% on the lot. For a two-hundred-litre barrel that is roughly three thousand nine hundred pounds at the end of eight years.
Before the cask is filled, yes, in full. After it is filled, only under the shortfall policy, because the spirit is in the wood and cannot be un-filled.
We have no idea and we are not permitted to guess. We do not produce valuations, we do not endorse anybody else’s, and the honest answer to what your cask is worth is: several hundred bottles of whisky.
The whisky.
New-make spirit distilled from malted barley grown on this farm, filled at 63.5% ABV. It is not whisky until it has been in oak for three years, which is a legal definition rather than an opinion.
Between 46% and cask strength. Below 40% it cannot legally be called whisky at all, and between 40% and 46% we will try to talk you out of it.
Between seventy-five and six hundred and fifteen depending on the cask, and the figure on each cask page is an expectation rather than a promise. The regauge at the end is the number that counts.
Because our warehouse is damp, so proportionally more alcohol than water leaves through the oak. In a dry warehouse the reverse happens and the strength climbs.
One 200ml sample a year, duty paid, sent to you. Plus a draw straight from the cask on bottling day, which is the only time you get it at full strength.
The law.
No, and the entire product is built to make sure it is not one. You buy goods at a fixed price and receive bottles. There is no cash return, no profit share, no buy-back and no market, because the alternative would be an unauthorised collective investment scheme under section 235 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000.
Not through us, and we will not introduce you to anybody who would buy it. Gifting to one named person, for nothing, is the only transfer we permit.
Yes. It is a numbered, ascertained cask held under a delivery order in your name on an HMRC-approved warehouse stock account. It is not part of our estate and not available to our creditors.
Because publishing a value creates a return, and a return is what would make this a security. It is the single most common question and the answer is not going to change.
Not an investment
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 six casks
Fifty litres to five hundred.
The angel’s share
Two to four per cent a year, compounding.
Duty and tax
A worked example, all in.
Not an investment
The three cases, and why it matters.
Start at the beginning.
Six casks, one warehouse, and the argument for why it is built this way.
