Fill, lie, sample, regauge, bottle, deliver.
Six operations spread across five to twelve years, three of which involve you and none of which involve money changing hands after the first day.
The whole thing, in order.
You choose a cask and pay once
Size, wood and window. The price is fixed on the day and includes storage and insurance for the entire term. There is nothing further to pay until the spirit leaves bond.
We fill it and give it a number
New-make at 63.5% ABV, on a named day, into a stencilled cask. You get the fill date, the number, the wood and a photograph of the head.
It goes into the warehouse stock account
Recorded in your name, under a delivery order, in an HMRC-approved excise warehouse. That record is what makes the cask legally yours rather than ours.
It lies there and gets sampled once a year
Drawn by valinch, tasted, written up and sent to you. Some years the note says very little. We send those too.
At the end it is regauged
The warehousekeeper measures volume and strength and issues the figure. That is the number your bottle count comes from, not our estimate.
It is reduced, bottled and released
To 46% ABV in 700ml bottles, labelled with your cask number. Excise duty and VAT fall due on the day it leaves the warehouse, and they are yours to pay.
A pallet arrives at your house
On a tail-lift, to a signature, to somebody over eighteen. That is the whole return.
01/ 03
The three things that are genuinely different about this.
The cask is ascertained from day one
Your cask has a number the moment it is filled and the warehouse stock account is in your name. It is not a share of a vat, not a fraction, and not an entitlement to be allocated later.
That is a legal point rather than a romantic one. Ascertained goods are yours in an insolvency; an unascertained share is a claim in a queue.
- Numbered
- On the fill day
- Held
- Under a delivery order in your name
The price never moves
Whatever happens to the barley price, the energy price, the price of oak or the price of second-hand casks, you pay what you agreed on the day you bought it.
And whatever happens to what casks fetch elsewhere, you receive bottles. The two facts are related: a fixed price and a delivery in kind are what keep this a sale of goods rather than a financial product.
- Fixed
- At purchase
- Storage
- Included, all years
There is no exit, because an exit is a return
You cannot sell the cask back to us and we will not introduce you to anybody who will buy it. That is not us being difficult. A buy-back is a cash return, and a cash return is the thing that turns this into a scheme.
What you can do is leave it longer, take the bottles early and pay the duty, or give the whole cask to a named person for nothing.
- Buy-back
- None
- Transfer
- By gift only
Who does what.
Us
- Distilling and filling
- On a named day, at 63.5% ABV
- Warehousing
- In an HMRC-approved excise warehouse on the estate
- Insurance
- For the whole window, at replacement value of the spirit
- Annual sample and note
- Whether or not it flatters us
- Bottling and labelling
- At 46% ABV, with your cask number
You
- Paying once
- On the day, at the fixed price
- Being over eighteen
- Carded at checkout and again at the door
- Duty and VAT on withdrawal
- Charged by HMRC, collected by us, not ours to waive
- Deciding when it comes out
- At the end of the window, or later
- Signing for a pallet
- Which is larger than most people picture
Nobody
- Valuing it
- We do not produce a figure
- Buying it back
- There is no buy-back at any price
- Selling it on your behalf
- There is no brokerage and no introduction
A barrel, year by year.
Filled at 63.5% ABV and stencilled. Two hundred litres. The photograph of the cask head is the only thing you get for a while.
The first note. Raw, hot, and mostly a description of the spirit rather than the wood. Most people find this year disappointing and most people are right.
It is legally whisky. Volume is down to about 184 litres and the wood has started to show. This is the earliest we would let it out.
Roughly 174 litres. The note gets longer. Vanilla and cereal, and the heat has gone off it.
The window closes. Regauge expected at 159.4 litres and 56.5% ABV. About 280 bottles once it is reduced to 46%.
Duty paid, bottles labelled, pallet delivered, and forty litres of it somewhere over Chipping Norton.
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.
One payment
Fixed on the day, including storage and insurance.
One note a year
Sent whether or not it is flattering.
One regauge
Measured by the warehousekeeper, not estimated by us.
One pallet
And then it is over.
Where it lies for all those years.
A stone barn with an earth floor, an HMRC approval and no heating.
