It lies in a stone barn, in duty suspension, in your name.
An excise warehouse is a legal status rather than a building type. Ours happens to be a nineteenth-century Cotswold barn with an earth floor, which is the best thing about it and also the reason the strengths come down.
The warehouse.
Status
- Approval
- Approved by HMRC as an excise warehouse under the Customs and Excise Management Act 1979
- Regime
- Duty suspensionNothing is payable to HMRC until the spirit is removed
- Stock account
- Every cask recorded by number, against the owner’s name
- Your paperwork
- A delivery order in your name, held by you and by the warehousekeeper
Conditions
- Building
- Cotswold stone, slate roof, earth floor, no heating
- Racking
- Dunnage, three casks high
- Temperature
- Roughly 2°C to 26°C across a year
- Humidity
- High. Which is why strengths fall rather than rise
Cover
- Insured against
- Fire, flood, theft and physical damage
- At
- Replacement value of the spirit
- Not insured against
- EvaporationThat is not a loss event, it is what oak does
- Cost to you
- Nil. It is inside the purchase price for the whole window
Why there is no annual storage bill.
Most cask operators charge storage and insurance yearly. It is a perfectly reasonable way to run a warehouse and it is also how people end up with a cask they have stopped paying for and a demand letter they were not expecting.
We take the whole thing up front and put it inside the purchase price, which is why a twelve-year butt costs what it does. It means the number on the page is the only number, and it means nobody loses a cask to a forgotten direct debit.
If you leave the cask in bond beyond its window, that is free too. We would rather have a full barn than an argument.
What you can and cannot do with a cask in bond.
| You want to | Can you | What actually happens |
|---|---|---|
| Visit it | Yes | By arrangement, on a bottling day or a brewery tour. It is a working bonded warehouse, so not on a whim. |
| Sample it early | Yes | One extra draw a year beyond the annual sample, sent to you duty-paid in a 200ml bottle. |
| Take it out early | Yes, after three years | Duty and VAT fall due on the day it leaves. Before three years it is not whisky and cannot be labelled as any. |
| Leave it in longer | Yes | On the same terms, at no further cost, for as long as you like. |
| Move it to another warehouse | Yes | Under a duty-suspended movement, at your cost, with the receiving warehousekeeper’s agreement. |
| Sell it to somebody | No | We do not operate or facilitate a market. Gifting is the one permitted transfer. |
| Get it valued by us | No | We do not produce valuations. Any figure would be a return, and a return is the problem. |
In your name
On the warehouse stock account, from the fill day.
Insured
Fire, flood, theft, damage. Not evaporation.
No annual bill
Storage is inside the price, for the whole window.
Movable
To another bonded warehouse, if you would rather.
What happens to your cask if this business fails
Your cask is ascertained goods 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. That is the practical reason we will not sell fractions of a cask to anybody: a fraction is unascertained, and an unascertained share puts you in the queue rather than in the warehouse.
The questions the bond gets.
Not while it is in duty suspension, no. You can have the emptied cask afterwards if you want a very large piece of furniture, and a surprising number of people do.
The insurance pays the replacement value of the spirit and we refill a cask of the same size and wood at our cost. What we cannot replace is the years, and we will not pretend otherwise.
The estate holds the approval and a named individual is the authorised warehousekeeper. On a demonstration build that person is fictional; on a real one they would be named here.
On a bottling day, or on a brewery tour that includes the warehouse. Not otherwise, because it is a bonded building and casually wandering through one causes problems for everybody.
The day it comes out.
Regauge, reduction, bottling, labelling, and a pallet. You are welcome to be there.
