The only way a cask ever changes hands here.
You can give your cask to a named person, for nothing, once. You cannot sell it, list it, auction it or transfer it for value, and the reason is not sentiment — a transfer for value is a secondary market, and a secondary market is what turns goods into a security.
How a gift actually works.
You name the recipient
One person, over eighteen, with an address we can deliver a pallet to. Not a company, not a trust, not a syndicate.
They confirm and are carded
Age verification on the recipient, because at the end of this there is a great deal of whisky with their name on it.
The warehouse record changes
The cask is re-recorded on the stock account in their name and a new delivery order is issued. This is the actual transfer; everything else is ceremony.
They get a card with the cask number on it
Letterpressed, with the number, the wood, the fill date and the year it comes out. It is a very good thing to open, and it is the only physical object involved for several years.
The notes go to them from then on
Annual samples, tasting notes and the cellar entry. You stop getting them, which surprises people, so it is said here rather than discovered later.
They get the bottles at the end
And the duty bill, which is worth mentioning to them before the card is opened rather than after.
What a gift includes, and what it costs.
The transfer
- Cost
- NothingThere is no fee and there never has been
- Permitted transfers
- One, per cask
- Recipient
- A named individual over eighteen
- For value
- NeverA transfer for money is a sale, and there is no sale
What they receive now
- The card
- Letterpressed, with the cask number and the outturn year
- The cellar entry
- Fill date, wood, volume, last regauge, years remaining
- The annual note
- Every year until it is bottled
- A sample
- One draw a year, sent duty-paid in a 200ml bottle
What they receive later
- The bottles
- All of them, with their name on the label if they want it
- The duty bill
- Which is theirs, not yoursTell them
- A place at bottling day
- Two, in fact
Casks gifted before the fifteenth arrive as a card by Christmas Eve.
The cask itself will not be ready for years, which is rather the point. What arrives is a letterpressed card with a number on it and a date in the 2030s.
Why we will not let you sell it.
This is the question the gifting page gets most, usually phrased as: what if my circumstances change.
The answer is that the moment casks can be transferred for money, somebody starts quoting prices, somebody else starts brokering them, and the arrangement stops being a farm selling whisky forward and starts being a market in an asset. That is the exact transition that section 235 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 is about, and it is the transition that has cost people a great deal of money in this industry.
So if your circumstances change, the options are: leave it in bond at no further cost, take the bottles out early and pay the duty, or give it to somebody who will enjoy it. There is no fourth option, and the absence of a fourth option is a feature.
Free
No transfer fee, ever.
One person
Named, over eighteen, with an address.
Never for money
A sale is a market, and a market is the problem.
A card now
The whisky comes in the 2030s.
The questions gifting gets.
No. One named individual, because a cask held jointly by several people who each expect a share starts to look uncomfortably like a pooled arrangement.
No. One transfer per cask. A cask that can be passed along indefinitely is a tradeable instrument in everything but name.
You cannot transfer it to somebody under eighteen. What people do instead is keep the cask, name it after them, and gift it on their eighteenth birthday, which works and is a great deal more moving.
It stays with you, and nothing is lost except a card. We ask them before anything moves on the stock account.
Look after the ones you have.
Cask number, fill date, last regauge, this year’s note and the years still to run.
