Bottling a Cask

The one thing that a malt whisky fanatic would always dream of doing is owning a cask of whisky from one of their favourite distilleries and eventually bottling that cask so they would have their own personal bottling . In 2001 with the re-opening of Bruichladdich Distillery that dream came a step closer for a lot of Islay whisky lovers .

I jumped at the chance to purchase a small "Bloodtub" for £195 , 32 litres of a new style of spirit called Port Charlotte , heavily peated to 40 ppm . Now it was just the case of waiting for it to mature in the old Loch Indaal Distillery warehouse in Port Charlotte (what a co-incidence !) ....... oh and paying the baby a visit or two and getting regular samples to see how the bairns growing up !

The Bloodtub

We visited our little cask once a year , drew out samples and were quite surprised at how well it matured , it was highly drinkable at 2yo though not officially whisky . On our last visit during the 2005 festival we decided that it was well and truly ready , in December 2004 it had been reracked into another fresh bloodtub (due to problems they'd encountered with some of the originals) and we didn't want too much sherry influence .

Sample Video
Video 1.85mb

After informing the Distillery of our intention to bottle the cask we asked for some information regarding the process . You can of course just pay the Duty and Vat and walk out with the cask but we decided we wanted the cask bottled on Islay ( it looks good on the label saying Distilled , Matured and bottled on Islay ! ) .First on the questions was what bottle will be used ? (on the site they state it won't be the distillery shape ) It's actually a standard shape bottle (like the ordinary Murray McDavid bottle) . The cost of bottling is £30 per 12 bottles (incl bottle,cork,capsule,basic label and carton) . What is the chargable duty ? £19.56 per litre OLA ( Original Litres of (100%) Alcohol ) or the equivalent of £8.62 on a 70cl bottle at Cask strength (it's about 63% volume , a 70cl bottle contains 0.441 litres of the OLA , so it's 0.441 x £19.56 = £8.62). And of course there's the good old Vat to go on everything at 17.5% !!!!

Labelling ....Can i use my own ? Yes but they have to approve it , it must in the UK include the words "Single Islay Malt Scotch Whisky" , The size of the bottle (70cl or 700ml) , the Alcoholic strength and where it came from ! ( Product of Scotland etc) . I told them i'd designed one and it seem to match all the criteria !

For a few weeks i'd been honing my label design , i'd come to an agreement with the artist Ian Gray (http://www.iangray.de) to use one of his paintings and this is the process i went through .....

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