A Laggan Bay cask costs £5,500 on paper, but with bottling and taxes the total comes to more than twice that. Laggan Bay, the eleventh working distillery on Islay, is selling The Hundred: 100 founding casks, being filled in August and September 2026. In newsletters sent on 5 and 9 September, the distillery said only a limited number remained.

This is not the first private cask sale we have covered (see below), so it is a good chance to look at the real costs in detail.

What £5,500 buys

Each cask is a first-fill ex-bourbon American oak barrel of around 200 litres. The price covers ten years in a bonded warehouse on Islay, cask management and insurance. A £500 deposit secures the cask and the balance is due within 28 days. Buyers own the spirit: the cask itself stays with Laggan Bay.

After ten years the distillery expects 225 to 250 bottles at cask strength, around 58-60%, and states that the price does not change with the yield. Owners can also have the whisky bottled at 46%. Two samples are included, one of new make at filling and one at about three years; further samples cost £75 each. Anyone who wants to bottle early still has to wait for Laggan Bay’s first official release.

The distillery makes a heavily peated spirit, but so far only the new make has been available to taste. In short, buyers have to trust a new distillery. Those who did the same with Ardnahoe years ago have probably not been disappointed.

Laggan Bay is owned by Ian Macleod Distillers, the family-owned company behind Glengoyne, Tamdhu and Rosebank, and run by distillery manager Malcolm Rennie.

Casks are sold only to private individuals, who must declare that they are not retailers or funds and are not buying to invest. The terms state that a cask is not an investment product and promise no return. An owner who wants to sell must first offer the cask to Laggan Bay, which then has 90 days to decide.

The full bill

The price leaves out bottling and dry goods such as bottles and labels, duty and VAT, and transport from the collection point in Broxburn, West Lothian. Laggan Bay has not published its bottling charges and will apply the rates in force when the cask is bottled; cask broker Mark Littler uses £10 plus VAT a bottle as a working estimate covering the bottle, cork, label and the bottling itself. UK spirits duty is £33.99 per litre of pure alcohol, about £14 per 70cl bottle at 59%. When the whisky leaves bond, VAT at 20% is charged on everything: cask, bottling and duty.

Assuming 240 bottles at 59%, near the middle of Laggan Bay’s estimates, and today’s duty and VAT rates, the bill looks like this.

Laggan Bay’s terms allow export, so bottles going abroad can leave bond without UK duty and VAT; the owner pays local duty and VAT on arrival. In Italy that means excise of €1,035.52 per hectolitre of pure alcohol, just over €4 a bottle, and 22% VAT on value, excise and freight.

These are current rates, but the bill arrives in ten years: UK spirits duty rises with inflation and went up 3.66% in February 2026.

How it compares with Kilchoman

In September 2025 Kilchoman offered its Club members 150 private casks filled with its 50 PPM spirit: first-fill ex-bourbon barrels at £5,250 and ex-oloroso hogsheads at £6,950. As at Laggan Bay, the price covers ten years of warehousing and insurance, while duty, VAT and bottling are paid at the end. For 2026 the distillery has released a new batch at the same prices, with casks filled at 63.5%.

The terms are almost the same and the Laggan Bay cask costs £250 more. Kilchoman does not publish an estimated yield, but 200 litres at 63.5%, losing 2% a year to evaporation (the distillery’s own average), leave about 100 litres of pure alcohol after ten years. That is in line with Laggan Bay’s estimate, so the cost per bottle differs by only about a pound. The real difference is what buyers know about the whisky: Kilchoman has been distilling since 2005 and already sells whiskies aged ten years or more, such as the Rockside 11 Year Old.

At around £56 a bottle, a ten-year-old single cask bottled at full strength is not expensive whisky. The rest has to be budgeted for: about £13,500 paid out between now and 2036, for 240 bottles of the same whisky. That is why some buyers share a cask with friends or a club. Kilchoman allows this through private split-ownership agreements, as long as one person is registered as the legal owner; Laggan Bay registers each cask to a single individual, and its terms say nothing about sharing.