I am forever being asked the same question: what are the returns on a cask investment? The honest answer is both alarmingly simple and alarmingly difficult, both very high and very low, depending entirely on which way you choose to look at it.
As a Spear’s 500 whisky adviser, a contributor to Forbes, and the owner of The Whiskey Wash, I have spent years helping people buy and sell casks safely. So it feels like the right moment to break this complex subject down into something digestible, because the issue of returns is precisely where so many people get misled.
Let me start with a blunt warning. If the person selling you a cask leads with talk of returns, in all likelihood, you are being scammed. It is one of the oldest tricks in the playbook. When the cask boom kicked off around 2018 to 2020, companies leaned heavily on the Knight Frank index and its famous 500% growth figure. The trouble is that figure referred to rare bottles at auction, not casks, yet that inconvenient detail never stopped anyone.
The Advertising Standards Agency eventually stepped in, but the problem has simply mutated. The latest version sees companies buying back casks from a handful of customers at an inflated price, then parading that “profit” as proof of what you could earn. If a company can sell a cask for £5,000, buy it back for £15,000, and call that marketing, well, the logic should set off every alarm bell.
This brings me to the maths, which simply does not add up. These firms routinely quote returns of 8 to 12%. So ask yourself why a company would go to the expense of salespeople, offices, and overheads just to hand you that profit. If the returns were genuine, they could borrow money cheaply, sit on the casks themselves, and pocket the difference. The reason they do not is straightforward. You cannot make those returns in a short timeframe unless it is effectively a pyramid scheme. If the data were real, institutional investors and family offices would already be pouring millions in.
Here is the nuance that matters. A cask genuinely does increase in value, and averaged over twenty years it might look like 10% annually. Scotch value is tied to age. A Macallan 12 sits around £75, the 18 near £375, and the 25 around £25,000. That exponential leap only arrives with serious maturity. I have helped clients sell Springbank casks bought for £1,500 for several hundred thousand, and Macallan casks bought for £3,000 for over 1.2 million. What did they share? They waited fifteen, twenty, even thirty years.
So the real takeaway is this: cask investment is generational. Buy one for a grandchild, a wedding, a new arrival, or because you have had a windfall you genuinely do not need for decades. You cannot buy time, and time is the entire premise of Scotch investment. Would you ever consider holding a cask that long, or does the idea of a multi-decade wait change your view entirely?
For a more detailed breakdown of what you can expect from cask investment returns, you can watch my full video on the subject.
Read the full article at The Truth About Whisky Cask Investment Returns: Why Patience Is the Only Real Profit
