Investing in a whisky cask can be a great financial investment. We know first hand as we have helped sell millions of pounds worth of casks for people exiting their cask investment.
There is a significant range of returns made by our customers when selling their casks, which generally reflects the variation in prices for different brands within the cask market, and the length of investment period. In this article we share our seven steps to making an informed whisky cask investment in 2025.
Send me my free cask buying guide
"*" indicates required fields
7 Steps to Making A Sound Whisky Cask Investment In 2025
- Start with the basics
- Know the risks
- Take full ownership
- Invest for the long term
- Understand what data isn’t relevant to cask investment
- Do your due diligence
- Know the rules are changing
1. Start With The Basics
At Mark Littler LTD we believe that you should be equipped with all of the facts before you choose to invest. That is why we have written our free, downloadable PDF cask buying guide as well as the online content available on our blog, cask investment guides, and cask calculator.
Our content offers comprehensive and balanced information about the experience of owning a cask and the realistic expectations, costs and risks so that you can make a decision that is best for you.
As well as an understanding of the fundamentals of the market, you should also know the basics of the cask you’re looking to buy including:
- The distillery—and whether you have naming rights
- The fill date—also known as the AYS
- The cask fill details—including the Bulk litres or Litres of Alcohol and alcoholic strength (ABV)
- The cask size and type
- Where your cask will be stored and whether you will have confirmation from the warehouse on your ownership—more on this in point 3.
- Storage and any other ongoing costs or ties to your seller
Read more about these things to know here.
2. Know The Risks
Cask investment has several “inherent vices” that it is important to understand in order to know and reduce risks.
While whisky is maturing in a cask it tends to increase in value due to a combination of factors—age, quality and scarcity, you can read more about this in our guide. However casks are handmade, natural vessels and the whisky inside a cask evaporates over time. In Scotland the climate also means that the alcoholic strength of the whisky tends to drop. This results in two risks that you should be aware of.
The evaporation, which is sometimes known as the angel’s share, happens at an average rate of between 1% and 4% per year. That means that while the value of the whisky itself tends to go up with age, the amount of whisky you have is going down. What’s more, In Scotland the legal limit for the alcoholic strength of whisky is 40%.
This combination of evaporation of liquid and alcohol means that a whisky cask cannot mature indefinitely. At some point the contents will evaporate to the point that it starts to go down in value or the ABV will drop below 40%, in which case the cask loses the premium associated with being a scotch.
There are other inherent vices of casks—such as leakage—many of which cannot be insured against. And like other investments; past performance isn’t a guarantee of future trends. So as with all investments you should only invest money that you are comfortable losing in a worst case scenario.
3. Take Full Ownership
Ownership of a cask that is acknowledged by the warehouse offers you the most security for your long term investment. Traditionally this is done with a delivery order but a Warehouskeeper can set their own paperwork so the important thing is to get confirmation from the warehouse itself what they accept.
At Mark Littler Ltd we only sell casks through a delivery order as this gives purchasers the most security and control over their asset. By giving you full control of your asset a warehouse confirmed delivery order provides three important assurances:
- You’re not tied to sell with the company you purchased from, which give you the flexibility to shop around for the best price when you sell
- If something happens to the company you purchased from before you come to sell you still have direct control over your cask
- The WOWGR certified warehouse acts as an independent third party confirmation of the cask’s details, location and any limitations like naming rights.
On the more interactive side of things, if you own your cask completely, it also means you have the rights to draw samples from your cask, which is important if you’re buying a cask because you love scotch whisky.
4. Invest For the Long Term
At Mark Littler Ltd we began with helping people to sell their cask investments. This means we have a unique database of information on how people have profited from cask investment. The universal factor for the customers who profited most was time.
Whisky casks tend to increase in value with time but the customers who made the most profit also benefited from brand and market shifts and these take long term time frames of ten years and more.
Our minimum age for selling a cask is twelve years old. For young casks (buying at 4 to 12 years), our minimum suggested investment time frame is ten years, for new make it is 15 to 18 years. You can read more about the mechanics of why in our cask guide, but if you are not comfortable aiming for these kinds of investment horizons then cask investment may not be the solution for you.
5. Understand What Data Is Relevant to Cask Investment
In January 2024 the UK’s Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) introduced new legislation that applied to cask investment companies. This new guidance has thankfully reduced the amount of misleading data in adverts, but it is still important to know when and why the data you are being presented with may be misleading.
The use of the Knight Frank Index to demonstrate the potential of whisky casks has now been banned by the ASA as it is misleading; The Knight Frank Rare Whisky Index looks at a very specific section of the collectable whisky bottle market pitched at ultra high net worth individuals. Knight Frank data is barely relevant for the general whisky market and even less so for an indication of the potential performance of casks.
The 100 bottles of whisky tracked by the Knight Frank Index are ultra-rare, ultra-high value collectable bottles. These are bottles that are no longer in production and are usually scarce, high age-statement, official distillery bottlings. Official distillery released bottles will sell for considerably more than privately or independently bottled whiskies. Also vintage bottles have a different market to new releases. Finally, you also need to consider that your cask is the raw material of a bottle, getting the whisky from a cask and into a bottle has costs.
Using more general bottle values to understand how the value of whisky increases with age can help you understand how casks need to be a long term investment. However they should not be used as a direct indicator of the value of whisky in a cask at certain ages because of the taxes and costs involved in bottling. Indexes that track the value of collectable, vintage bottles are not relevant to whisky casks
Return rates are another area that the ASA clamped down on. If you are being shown return rates then they now have to be backed up by the company’s own, relevant data. The reality is that per annum returns are often unrealistic or over simplistic. This means they are potentially misleading and also do not properly reflect the nature of casks as an investment:
- Firstly, whisky does not produce annual returns! Your cask will sit in a warehouse gaining value, but you cannot release any money from your cask on an annual basis.
- Secondly, if 10 to 15% per annum returns were reliable, why are companies not taking a small business loan at 5% and keeping those profits for themselves? Or for that matter, why are pensions and investment firms not widely invested in casks?
6. Due Diligence
The previous point naturally leads onto this: the need for your own due diligence. Cask investment is unregulated and while there are plenty of legitimate companies out there, there are also others that are not.
At Mark Littler LTD we are very proud of our customer service, after all, the customers are at the heart of what we do. We have over 600 verified five-star reviews of our service across Google Reviews, Facebook, and Yell.com. Reviews can be a good place to start when deciding which company to work with, but reviews should not be taken at face value. It is important to look for verified reviews on subjects relevant to the company, and spread over a long period of time
A few ways to spot fake reviews include; accounts that have no profile picture, have only left one review on the platform, or have generic profile names. Paid for reviews are often dated around the same time and have nothing to do with the company, seeming to review a different product, or can be very vague, e.g. “Great customer service! Thank you”.
The long term 10+year nature of cask investment also means there can be an issue with reviews of cask investment companies as the reviews are based on the company’s sales rather that their long term successes. In that case you are buying from a company that has good customer service rather than one with a track record of helping people exit their investments. At Mark Littler Ltd we have been helping people exit their cask investments for as long as we have been selling casks, which means we know what works, and what doesn’t. Importantly our reviews reflect that.
Companies House on the GOV.UK website should also be a part of your due diligence framework. Companies House allows you to search for the name of a company so that you can check how long they have been around, if they sprang up from nowhere, or if they are even registered at all. This tool is a useful way to establish whether or not the company that you are considering buying from is worthy of your trust.
You can also Google the names of the directors with the word ‘scam’ as an additional check.
At Mark Littler LTD we are transparent from the word go. We are a fully licensed and registered company with offices in Congleton, Cheshire. Prefer to meet face to face? You can make an appointment to come and visit us and see what we are all about, we can also do online video conferences if you cannot reach us in person.
Overpaying for a cask is one of the easiest ways to lose money on a cask investment. Cask investment is an asymmetric market, which means the buyers know significantly less about the product they are purchasing compared to the seller. The new ASA rulings aim to bring some protection to consumers in this respect, however it is still difficult to verify a cask value, because there is no open source information on cask prices.
There is no publicly available information surrounding the value of whisky casks because the value depends on so many factors. There are a limited number of records of cask sales at auction, however these are difficult to compare to your cask due to the likely variation in cask size, fill details and also the issues with transferring ownership where casks are stored in warehouses that will not allow new client accounts.
There are three ways to do some basic checks on the price being offered:
Use our Cask Calculator to create an accurate per bottle cost price for the cask, which you can then compare to more widely available bottle prices. It is very important not to simply divide the cask cost by the number of bottles in the cask, as this misses taxes and other costs due on bottling and creates a misleading number.
Compare the price to publicly available casks being sold directly by distilleries. This comparison is not perfect as many distilleries offer casks as a way to support their venture, rather than as an investment, but it can be used as a guideline.
Getting a second opinion is another way to check prices, but obviously relies on trusting the expertise and reputation of the company you contact.
Cask auctions are not the best check, as often they tend to be significantly above or below the true market price. This tends to be because either the people bidding don’t understand the actual market value and overbid, or because they are stored in a warehouse that won’t open new accounts, which limits the scope of bidders. There are also issues with comparing different cask sizes or ages, so if you do decide to look at cask auctions then consider using results in conjunction with the Cask Calculator.
7. The Rules Are Changing
In 2025 one of the most important pieces of legislation around the maturation of scotch whisky casks is being updated. In March 2025 WOWGR will be amended and the storage and trading of whisky casks will be similar to wine and other duty suspended goods.
Private individuals in the UK have always been able to hold a small number of casks in their name as long as they aren’t actively trading in whisky casks. Non-UK based individuals and businesses were never covered by WOWGR.
The changes in March will mean that only Warehouses and Warehousekeepers will be able to be certified under WOWGR. This simplifies things for the industry and businesses trading in casks. However it does mean that many cask investment companies who had a WOWGR as a means of certification will no longer have that accreditation.
For private individuals the changes are also beneficial as it means those that wish to buy and sell more than five casks can do so without the lengthy WOWGR certification process to become an owner.
If you would like more information on buying casks of whisky with Mark Littler Ltd then please get in touch. You can email [email protected] and we will be happy to answer any questions you may have on buying and owning casks of whisky.
