We recently completed a lovely wee bottling project for gifts and personal consumption. This one really showcased that if you’re interest in owning, bottling and consuming your own single cask whisky, it is possible on a small and a much less pricey scale. You don’t have to commit to a massive cask and embark on the challenge of how you’ll manage to drink 200 – 300 bottles in your lifetime. You can start with sourcing a smaller cask like a blood tub or octave or even buy into a cask share scheme, something that is becoming ever popular.  For this one though, the client had already bought a cask and still wanted something bespoke but without spending too much money. Not a problem.

The cask itself was a lovely Staoisha port octave (50 litres) which was purchased through a cask broker. The first thing we needed to do was bring it out of that brokers management and into ours. This can be nerve wracking. If the cask itself isn’t from our own stock or sourced by us then there’s always the niggle whether 1. It even exists, 2. The information that has been provided to the owner on the sale of the cask is correct. When a private individual doesn’t have their own warehouse account and buys a cask through a third party, they aren’t privy to the paperwork which is passed between seller, broker and warehouse.

Thankfully, no drama here. Delivery order exchanged, details all checked out and the cask is booked to move from Caley Casks up in Speyside where it was stored, down to a bottling hall nearer to us using Marshall Brothers Transport, a super professional and specialised spirits haulier.

These bottles aren’t for sale and won’t be sitting on a shop shelf or internet site amongst all the other whisky brands that have the job to appeal to the most customers, so the client didn’t see reason to hire a designer to create a bespoke label. For exactly this reason, we have a selection of simple label templates that can be personalised and adjusted to suit a number of different bottle shapes. These templates are completely free, we simply edit, save as a PDF and pop them over to the printer. Easy!

Printing can be expensive, particularly for small numbers. The biggest expense is the tools that are required for cutting and foiling and the costs of setting up a print job. There are online print solutions that have ‘standard’ label sizes and low minimum order quantities but for this label we used the good people at Daymark Labels. We always shop around for quotes and these guys came in very well priced for such a low volume. Embellishments like gold foiling are becoming less expensive, so to give this basic black and white label a little ‘zhuzh’, the client was happy to pay up and add a little gold and some high build gloss over the photograph.

The client knew what style of glass bottle he wanted, thankfully it is one that’s stocked by quite a few bottling halls as standard. This again saves a bit of cash as they tend to already have the other components such as cork, capsule and cardboard cases to match and critically, no minimum order required. Our friends at Chapter 7 in Renfrewshire were good enough to bottle this little octave for us – their own whisky comes in this ‘Nocturne’ glass so everything was in stock and already to hand.

Bottled, labelled, UK duty paid and stickers attached, we were able to collect and hand deliver the bottles plus the now empty octave personally in Scotland.