01/02/2024 The internet has a long memory, in the sense that they say (whoever they might be) that data can always be found, even if you think you’ve deleted it. It certainly seems to work that way with politicians and their Tweets. I always assume that people know my stance regarding buying casks, because 2010, and my original website seems like yesterday. Buying casks of whisky should be for the purposes of selling the end product in bottles, or for fun with a group of friends. Investing in a product which has a shelf life and inevitably must be transferred into a bottle at some point is a r ..read more

The issue: HMRC require us to check up on seemingly every detail that we can find online about owners in our warehouse, without being specific or giving examples of what is too much. HMRC can ask us for information about owners many years later and demand to see evidence that we’ve done our due diligecence. It seems that having a questionnaire which the owner reads, answers and signs is insufficient. We have the responsibility to notice anything unusual, at any time. For example, a private owner decides to sell a cask. Is this trading? Is it only trading if they buy another one? Clearly, the s ..read more

Other than the first two paragraphs and the last paragraph, this text is copied and pasted from Excise Notices so please don’t blame me if you’re bored! As an Excise Warehousekeeper, we are responsible for performing due diligence checks on all owners of Under Bond (Duty Free) products in our warehouse. Some of your will have heard a lot from us about this recently, being asked what seem to be a lot of pointless questions which you may feel are none of our business. You don’t know the half of it! We have an additional document that we compile about you, which contains information from everywhe ..read more

25/11/2020 In the past year, Whiskybroker have seen a huge increase in the number of sales of casks within our warehouse which appear to be investment-only with no interaction at all between the owner and the cask, other than on paper. In some cases, casks may have transferred hands 4 or 5 times within a year in our warehouse, with no owner asking for the contents to be checked. It seems to us that this is an effort by each owner to sell the product on risk free for maximum profit, pushing the problem further down the chain. As warehousekeeper and bottler, we often deal with the customer at th ..read more

You purchase a cask of whisky and are excited about the prospect of bottling it in the future. Years of expectation. You bottle it. What happened? Why are there only 100 bottles? The person who sold it to me promised me I should get 240 bottles! Owning a cask of whisky should be exciting. It should be fun. In the first (poor quality) website I ever built on Microsoft Publisher in 2010, it was mentioned as the key aspect of any purchase. If you can do it with friends, even better. Spread the cost, spread the risk. The problem that is arising these days is that while £1,000 spread over 10 years ..read more

In 2014, we purchased empty warehouses. I sought to fill these warehouses with as many casks as possible to get the new premises earning money as quickly as possible. In doing so, I bought and sold casks, and encouraged people who purchased my casks to move casks they owned in other warehouses to store with me as well. It didn’t matter whether we’d originally sold them the whisky or not. In doing this, we set up useful relationships which were beneficial to both parties. Businesses smaller than us or similar in size were able to use our space in order to help themselves grow, and we were also ..read more

A few years ago, when we were having this website created, Jane and I were full of ideas about the things we would do to make it as interesting as possible for casual readers and whisky enthusiasts alike. My theory was that, although a distillery is in our plans for the future, what we do on a daily basis is probably quite interesting to people who have already visited a few distilleries, but have rarely seen what goes on in other parts of the industry. We should be able to offer you the unpolished, uncut version, which might offer some fresh insight. A couple of years have passed, and althou ..read more

To everybody impatiently waiting for the new bottlings, Sorry that we haven’t got them online yet – I spent a few hours last night adding products and cropping photographs, but we realised quite quickly that there is one crucial feature worth waiting for. Although we will be gradually changing most of the photographs and content on the site over the coming weeks, we can’t add the critical button that will allow people purchasing bottles to hold their bottles until a later date, thus saving money on shipping. Those of you who have already created an account may have noticed that there is a sect ..read more