Whisky

[dave the german]

Enjoy Steve!!
Got a friend who has a place in Port Ellen - I REALLY do need to go there!!

When you go, make sure you book a ferry, they get very busy (trucks shunting barley/malt/whisky) so you're lucky if you get on one without booking

Fortunately she has a couple of places on Islay, (that she also lets out if anyone wants to stay I can get details) and there's a couple of times in the year I would love to visit but I'll keep that in mind Steve

[BoxerCup R]

Drank some Mortlach 16 year old Distillers Dram recently and that is a lovely whisky, may need to buy myself a bottle

[Esbee]

Time to resurrect this thread…. It’s coming up to the festive season!
Anything Speyside to be honest. Of particular pleasure… Aberlour 12 y/o (benchmark). Balvennie Caribbean Cask, Glenallachie 15y/o, Tomintoul Seridh…. To name a few. Slange!

[ianbcr]

There seems to be a lot of advertising at the moment for owning full/part barrels of whiskey to which ive not looked into but is this a new liquid gold commodity.

[Paul]

Buying a barrel of freshly distilled whisky is a great investment or excellent way of getting your hands on A LOT of good whisky for a great price, but you are playing the long game with this one. It's going to be 12 years minimum before you get to enjoy your rewards, or significantly longer for a better return-on-investment/dram.

A bunch of mates and myself bought a cask of Springbank in around 1990, and a cask of Ardbeg the following year. We bottled half of the Springbank at 12 years and the other half at 16 years. The Ardbeg, we held our nerve until 23 years. We are still ploughing through our stock of Springbank and sold off some of the Ardbeg to cover our costs.

We paid in the early 1990's about £1000 for each cask/hogshead, and got roughly 180 bottles out of each one, at cask strength. Bottling costs and duty costs were around £12 per bottle, given that duty was due on the £1000 purchase price of the new barrel, rather than the retail value of the matured whisky. The best price I got for the Ardbeg was around £300 a bottle, with the lowest price about £200, so selling off about 30 bottles more than covered our costs for the whole exercise and still left us with a heathy stash of whisky to drink ourselves.

Having just celebrated my 60th birthday, would I dive in again and buy another barrel now? Probably not, but I have absolutely no regrets about doing it 30 years ago.