Some casks are bad. Ours have been.
Wood is a natural product filled by hand and left alone for a decade. A small proportion of casks go wrong — sulphury, woody, flat, or in one memorable case tasting distinctly of a garden shed. The policy for what happens then is agreed before you pay, because agreeing it in year eight is how people fall out.
What can actually go wrong.
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The cask is faulty
A sulphur taint from the wood, an over-active stave giving too much tannin, or a cask that simply gives nothing at all after eight years. It happens to perhaps one cask in twenty across the industry and there is no way to tell on the fill day.
We find it at the annual sample, and you find out in the same week we do.
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The outturn is materially short
If the regauge comes in more than ten per cent below the expected outturn printed on your cask page — from a leak, a bad stave or a cask stored badly — that is a shortfall, and it is on us rather than on the angels.
Ordinary evaporation inside the stated range is not a shortfall. It is the thing the page told you would happen.
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The cask is physically damaged or lost
Fire, flood, theft or a forklift. The insurance covers replacement value of the spirit and we refill an identical cask at our cost.
What insurance cannot replace is the years. We will say so plainly rather than pretending a new fill is the same thing.
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You simply do not like it
This is not a fault, and we are not going to pretend it is. Taste is taste, we sent you a note every year, and there is a sample scheme precisely so that nobody arrives at year eight with a surprise.
That said, we would rather have the conversation than the complaint, and the swap window exists for it.
A cask you do not like is a disappointment. A cask that is faulty is our problem.
What happens in each case.
| What happened | Who decides | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Faulty cask found at an annual sample | You, from three options | Re-rack into fresh wood at our cost and continue; swap to an equivalent cask from the same fill year; or a full refund of the price you paid. |
| Regauge more than 10% below the stated outturn | You | Bottles from an equivalent cask to make up the shortfall, or a proportionate refund against what was actually delivered. |
| Cask damaged, stolen or destroyed | Us, then you | An identical cask refilled at our cost, or a full refund of the price you paid. We will not pretend the years come back. |
| Cask leaks and is caught early | The warehousekeeper | Re-racked immediately into sound wood, at our cost, and you are told the same day. |
| You do not like the note in year three | You | One swap to a different cask of the same size and window, once, within the first four years. After that it is yours. |
| Ordinary evaporation within the stated range | Nobody | Nothing. It is what the page said would happen and it is priced in. |
| You change your mind after the cask is filled | You | Nothing. The spirit is in the wood and cannot be un-filled. Stated here rather than discovered later. |
Why the policy is written down first.
A shared-risk term that appears for the first time in a dispute is worth nothing and reads as an excuse. Written before payment, it is a term of the contract and it binds us.
There is also a consumer-law point. A blanket "no refunds if the cask is poor" clause, with no substitution and no shared-risk framing, would sit squarely on the grey list of unfair terms in Schedule 2 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015, and would very likely be unenforceable. It would also be a rotten way to behave.
And a practical point. The remedies above cost us money in the years they trigger, which is a real incentive to fill good wood, rack properly and check the casks. A policy that costs the operator nothing is a policy nobody enforces.
The policy, in two columns.
What is guaranteed
- A named remedy for every failure case, agreed before payment
- Annual notes, including the unflattering ones
- One free swap in the first four years, for any reason at all
- Insurance at replacement value of the spirit
- A shortfall threshold stated as a number, not a judgement
- Refunds paid in money where a refund is the remedy
What is not
- Any suggestion that ordinary evaporation is a fault
- Any remedy that depends on us agreeing the whisky is bad
- Any requirement to return bottles you have opened
- Any claim that insurance can replace eight years
- Any cash payment that is not a refund of what you paid
Refunds are the one time money moves the other way
A refund is a return of the price you paid for goods that were not delivered as described. It is not a return on an investment, it is not calculated against what whisky is worth, and it never exceeds what you handed over. That distinction is the whole reason this page can promise a refund at all without turning the product into something else.
The questions this page gets.
The distiller and the warehousekeeper, on the annual sample, and they tell you in the same week. If you disagree with the call we will pay for an independent nose. We have done it twice and lost once.
More than ten per cent below the expected outturn printed on the cask page. That is a number rather than an opinion, deliberately.
No. One swap, in the first four years. Beyond that the whole thing becomes a trading desk, which is exactly what it must not be.
On a demonstration build, no, because none of this exists. In the trade, constantly. Roughly one cask in twenty is disappointing and about one in a hundred is genuinely faulty.
Give the whole thing to somebody instead.
The one transfer we permit, and the only way a cask changes hands here.
