This month’s whisky club is really all about the cask. We are lucky enough to work with a variety of cooperages and wineries who are always on the look out for casks that are of especially high quality or have a particularly interesting history, that we can utilise to add another layer of depth, complexity, and intrigue to our whisky.

Around a year and a half ago the team at Transwood let us know about an interesting Tokay cask they had come across. This 300L cask had held tokay up in South Australia for at least 50 years, but the cask itself was constructed some time before WW2, and markings on the cask hinted that it has spent some time as a brandy cask at a well known South Australian Distillery prior to being used for Tokay.

But this casks history doesn’t occur only on Australian shores, the timber that went into making this cask also has a story to tell.

Firstly, the staves used in the cask had been split by hand, rather than sawn, giving further indication of the casks age. As well as this, the timber is a type known as ‘Baltic oak’, which unsurprisingly comes from the Baltic region. It’s impossible to say if the cask was first coopered in Australia with oak shipped out for the burgeoning wine industry, or the cask was constructed in Europe and used to ship spirit to Australia at a time Australia wasn’t producing much for itself yet, either way the cask has a long and varied history that we have used to influence our whisky.

This months release was originally matured in Australian Tawny casks before being finished in this exceptional cask.