How do you read a cask number on a whisky bottle?

A single cask label usually states, besides the distillery, the cask number, the cask type, the distillation date, the bottling date, the number of bottles from the cask and the bottle number.

Those details are there because the bottler used only one cask and can therefore say exactly where the contents come from. With a regular bottling from dozens of casks, that is not possible.

The cask type tells what the wood was previously used for. The Scotch Whisky Association permits oak casks that are new or have previously held still wine, fortified wine, beer or spirits, with a capacity of up to 700 litres.

Cask strength is often stated: the alcohol content as it came out of the cask, with no water added.

The cask number is the administrative number the owner uses to find that one cask in the warehouse, and nothing more.

There is no uniform system. Every distillery and every independent bottler numbers in its own way, sometimes continuously per year, sometimes per warehouse or per cask type.

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society, for example, works with two numbers: the first stands for the distillery, the second for the number of casks the society has bottled from that distillery so far. So code 46.86 belongs to the eighty-sixth cask of distillery 46.

Two bottles from different bottlers with the same cask number therefore have nothing to do with each other.

The designation of sale, the alcohol content and the way age and years may be stated are fixed. The regulations say nothing about cask numbers, outturn and bottle numbers.

The Scotch Whisky Regulations 2009 require that a maturation period or age be expressed in years. The Scotch Whisky Association adds that it always refers to the age of the youngest whisky in the bottle, and to a single number.

Regulation (EU) 2019/787 sets the same line for the whole European market: a maturation period or age may only be stated if it refers to the youngest component and the maturation took place under official supervision.

If a bottle of Scotch shows a distillation year, a bottling year, maturation period or age must appear in the same field of vision. Numbers that could cause confusion about age or distillation date are prohibited.

The outturn is the number of bottles that came out of that cask; the bottle number shows which bottle from that series you are holding.

How many bottles a cask yields depends on the size of the cask and the years it has lain. Isle of Arran Distillers reckons about 280 bottles of 70 cl after ten years for a 200-litre barrel, and about 360 bottles for a 250-litre hogshead, at 46 percent.

The longer the cask stays lying, the less comes out. A low outturn therefore points more to a small cask or a long maturation than to anything else.

At the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, the monthly release is itself called the Outturn. So the same word is used for two things: the number of bottles from a cask, and a batch of new bottlings.

From a cask number you can tell that the whisky comes from a single cask and which cask that was according to the bottler. It says nothing about quality.

Because nobody prescribes the numbering, a cask number is neither a quality mark nor a guarantee. What can be compared is the age statement in years and the alcohol content, because fixed rules apply to those.

The number does have practical use: with distillery, cask number and bottling date added, a bottle can be identified unambiguously, queried with the bottler and traced later.

In het whiskyschap aan de Brink 2 in Bathmen staan 4.017 whisky’s van 587 merken uit 31 landen, waarvan 2.863 uit Schotland en 333 uit Ierland. Daarvan hebben 86 flessen Single Cask in de naam, van 45 merken uit 9 landen. Wij verkopen geen alcohol aan mensen onder de 18 jaar: NIX18.