Trade
A whisky barrel bought for £130 will go on sale for £270,000. And hilariously, the guy who bought it doesn’t even really like whisky.
“I don’t drink Scotch,” says Surrey pensioner Angus Kerr. “If I did, I would be looking around for something that was £18, no more. That’s my sort of level.”
Yet he bought the Glenrothes single malt in 1971 as an investment, hoping it would help pay for his children’s school fees. A barrel that is said to be the oldest of its kind known to be in existence.
Returns on whisky casks like this are extremely rare. Fair warning.
Whisky barrel bought for £130 goes on sale at £270k
Kerr, a former commodities trader, said he had made the purchase after hearing about a company selling barrels of new-fill whisky.
“I thought at least I can go for a swim in it if it all goes belly up,” he told BBC Radio Surrey.
The original plan was to sell the barrel five years later for a profit. But would you believe it. The cask investment went bust and there was no means to contact them. That is just so not like those guys. Right? Good things so much has changed these days.
“I just threw my hands in the air and thought, ‘OK, that was silly’,” Kerr added.
Old Glenrothes sells for big bucks
Don’t think this happens all the time
This was not a harsh but necessary lesson in the dangerous, difficult world of whisky cask investment, however. A few years later, the 81-year-old was contacted out of the blue by a Glaswegian company, which said he owed them money for storing the barrel.
After getting waylaid by “business, kids and life in general”, Kerr said he had only recently contacted broker Mark Littler to try to sell the barrel, which contains enough for approximately 287 bottles.
Kerr said the tasting experts had declared the 57-year-old whisky “absolutely fantastic”. “It could have lost its alcohol content or ended up being very oaky and horrible, so it’s very fortunate,” he added. “What we need to find is Elon Musk, [Jeff] Bezos or someone for who £270,000 is just spare change to them.”
On how he would spend the proceeds, Kerr said he would not have any “difficulty finding a home for the money” with his children and eight grandchildren.
“But it goes pretty quickly these days,” he added. It certainly does.
