Cask Ownership Guide

Discover why Auction Your Cask is the expert partner in your whisky journey. Download our concise and thorough Cask Ownership Guide for everything you need to know about Cask Spirit Purchasing.

We saw a record-breaking price achieved for a bottle at auction, with a 60-year old Macallan being sold for an extraordinary £1.5m at Sotheby’s. The sale of this bottle - from cask number 263 - even broke the previous auction record for a single bottle of Scotch of £1.2m in 2018.

In 2022 the world's largest bottle of whisky - 5'11 and 86 gallons (444 bottles) of Macallan sold for £1.3m. An entire collection from a single owner of 467 bottles sold for £7,635,619, which was around double the pre-auction estimate. This collection took less than ten years to compile and was mostly made up of individual cask whisky in limited-edition bottles.

Scotch Whisky is exported to 180 markets worldwide, and 44 bottles are shipped every second. Revenue in the UK Whisky segment amounted to £2.01bn in 2022. The market is expected to grow annually by 14.92% (CAGR 2022-2025). Export value of Scotch Whisky in 2021 was £4.5bn. Some countries have increased their import of scotch whisky by 150% over 18 months. Scotch whisky is truly a global phenomenon (source TSWIR).

There are currently 22 million casks of whisky maturing in Scottish bonded warehouses, with Scotch accounting for 22% of the United Kingdom’s entire food and drinks exports. There are currently 141 operating Scotch Whisky distilleries across Scotland.

Recently these distilleries have seen cask sales as a source of early revenue. They often sell unaged new-make spirit casks costing in excess of £6,000. Our starting price for casks is £1,500 for new-make whisky from well-established distilleries