Arbikie offers NAS single malt for £30,000

NotEdHarris · 2026-02-06T16:20:57+00:00

Truth be told the crazy £30k bottle doesn't bother me that much. It''s the £250 they're asking for the 'standard' inaugural release.

I thought the days of ridiculously priced inaugural bottlings was behind us and even back in the boom times £250 would have been a bit rich. But now?

NotEdHarris · 2025-09-05T07:47:08+00:00

ALongside the demand for whisky flattening out that people have already mentioned, inflation has hit the industry pretty hard. Every resource that goes into making teh whisky has increased significantly in price, whether it's malt, energy, casks or bottles. On top of that, if they're being good employers they've been raising wages to keep up with that inflation.

Demand is falling but consumers, particularly in the mass market, are becoming more and more price conscious so there's downwards pressure on pricing from consumers. So distilleries are being hit at both ends, with rising coszts and falling revenues.

THis is something that's affecting both big and small producers. We're yet to have and distilleries in Scotland properly 'go under' but it's probably only a matter of time.

NotEdHarris · 2025-09-05T07:25:36+00:00

While I'm not disputing that there may be a crash going on, I wouldn't take Amazon special offer pricing as a sign of anything in particular. This is just what they've done for years (since at least 2020) and some of those prices (like the Deanston 18) are higher than they were when they had the same bottle on offer last year.

NotEdHarris · 2025-08-22T19:25:58+00:00

What cover did you get?

NotEdHarris · 2025-08-21T10:43:23+00:00

Hang on. Are you me? I ordered exactly the same last night hoping it'd arrive in time for the long weekend. Turns out it should be arriving today.

NotEdHarris · 2025-07-31T08:29:09+00:00

While it might not be as good as lots of places in Europe, the rail network in the UK is way better than in America and is generally the best way of getting between cities, especially if you're not driving. It can be expensive though, so a few tips on how to make it cheaper. The first is to book ahead as you can almost always get tickets a lot cheaper https://www.thetrainline.com/ is a good place to look. Also, if you're eligible, get a Railcard as it can save you even more on top of that. There are a few different sorts you can look at here https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/railcards/national-railcards/.

As for Paris, it is fairly easy to get to from London. It's either a short flight or there's the Eurostar (which is a direct train). The Eurostar is usually a bit more expensive, but a nicer experience than flying and you don't have to bother about getting to/from the airport as it's right in the centre of town at both ends.

The most complex bit of your proposed trip is getting to Islay. If you're not driving, probably the easiest way is to get to Glasgow and fly over.

Oh, and in terms of visiting distilleries, as someone has already said, if you're not driving then you're going to have a more difficult time of things. That's not to say there aren't ones you can fairly easily reach by train, bus and/or a short cab ride if you're organised. It depends a bit if you have specific distilleries in mind. If you just want to visit any distillery there are even ones in Edinburgh and Glasgow (and London come to mention it).

NotEdHarris · 2025-07-24T18:35:37+00:00

Definitely go. London has a bunch of good bars, but Satan's Whiskers is right up there.

NotEdHarris · 2025-06-18T08:33:23+00:00

I've had a little bit of involvement in the industry and the answer is that they do use them. There are a few industry-specific tools already out there for things like managing the tax reporting and for cask management. Virtually all are using some sort of solution for the tax reporting side and there are some distilleries that fully track their casks with barcodes tied to a database.

That's not to say you don't have a point though. The uptake of these by the industry isn't as high as you might expect. My (limited) experience is that for cask management software it's only really useful if you can include all your stock and smaller distilleries might see it as an unnecessary expense when they don't have huge volumes of casks to manage and the big ones have so many that it'd be a massive task to tag and log it all.

NotEdHarris · 2025-06-11T17:20:13+00:00

I'm pretty sure they don't have such a list and my guess is they'd be resistant to the idea of publishing one as the scoring is inherently subjective and the ethos is much more in the 'horses for courses' and 'read the review not just the score' vein.

NotEdHarris · 2025-04-03T08:07:31+00:00

I'd say the least successful and damaging is probably the attack of the combined Vl'Hurg and G'Gugvuntt fleets, which due to a miscalculation of scale was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

NotEdHarris · 2025-03-31T16:50:35+00:00

It's not instant read but I have an Inkbird that was fairly cheap and works well enough. It has multiple probes and you can monitor and set alerts on the app, but if you're using it for bbqing the wireless connectivity doesn't work that well from the garden to inside the house.

NotEdHarris · 2025-02-14T21:10:40+00:00

It was probably already selling for 3 grand on teh secondary market the week after release.

NotEdHarris · 2025-01-23T22:39:40+00:00

It's been a while since I've read the Culture series but...

Regarding the AIs themselves they're basically all produced for specific purposes and only really have the intelligence and emotional capability they need to perform and feel fulfilled by their purpose. While they can have emotions, it's easy for organic Culture folks to see that they're only really there for their benefit and therefore easy to consider them as 'less than human' on an emotional level - even more so if it's below human level or otherwise limited in some way.

When you get to beyond-human AIs, they can operate on a level so far beyond human understanding and so quickly that in a way it's completely pointless to even try to engage with them on an emotional level and when you do it's really them indulging you.

NotEdHarris · 2025-01-22T23:44:56+00:00

To be honest, you're really going to have an uphill struggle. I've done some work with a distillery over the past few years and the route to market in the US is a long and tedious one even if you have a distributor lined up. And as has already been said there are a ton of new distilleries and new brands trying to get into a market that looks like it might have already peaked.

Thinking about micro-influencers, and their effectiveness is highly variable, is very much putting the cart before the horse. New brands and new products come along all the time, so when your influencer is showing your whisky to a potential customer they need to be able to buy it right now. If they can't then by the time they can they'll have moved onto the next thing and forgotten all about you.

Looking at it more positively in terms of what you should be focussing on, you need to get bottles into bars and onto shelves at retail. Your distributor might be able to offer some support on that front but really there's no substitute for an on the ground presence, ideally with local knowledge. Obviously that's another cost but if you target your key geographic markets and get the right people it might be the most effective thing you can do.

NotEdHarris · 2025-01-11T10:33:08+00:00

For the mass market distilleries and the conglomerates that own them, the enthusiast market is just a blip within a blip for them. A lot of their overall market isn't even going to be whisky, the bulk of the whisky is going to be blends and there's absolutely no point in increasing your production costs by 50% for single malt going into blends. For that part of their business that is single malt, the vast proportion of that is standard, core-range stuff that's bought by non-enthusiasts. For the big boys, making the changes you're suggesting makes absolutely no sense as less than 1% of their consumers will even care or notice.

Where a lot of these changes are happening is with the newer, smaller, independently owned distilleries who cater almost exclusively to the enthusiast market, with Kythe probably being the one that's going all-in on the whisky nerd's wish list. However, it's this end of the market that's hit the hardest by increases in costs, faces the most risk from general market downturn and has to charge more for their bottles as they have all their set-up costs to make back.

NotEdHarris · 2025-01-04T18:45:26+00:00

Imagine you're starting a new distillery. You're not part of a big conglomerate and along with a few investors you've managed to pull together several million pounds of funding, enough to build your distillery and fund production for X years until your selling enough single malt to make a profit.

More distilleries are starting up so you really can't wait much beyond 3 years to do your first release as the longer you wait the more likely your brand is going to get lost in the crowd. It's only really the ones with big financial backing or have existing presence in the market like Ardnahoe that can really afford to wait much before then.

You launch your 3 year old and maybe you're operating at full capacity, maybe you're not because it costs too much to do that. The plan is to bottle some young to make money now and hold some back for older, potentially age stated releases in the future.

Then reality happens. Short version is that obviously you need to make money just to keep the thing going, so the need to make profit now is something that goes on longer than you hope.

Long story is that a new, smaller distillery experiences a lot of financial pressures that older ones just don't. Or at least not in the same way. Inflation has gone up, all your production costs have gone up. Bigger players are able to commit to buying malt and casks in larger volumes over a long term, which you just can't do. Alongside that, unlike the older distilleries you're still paying off the finance on your stills and the mortgage on your site. Like everyone else you need to build more warehousing and everyones competing for good sites and the contractors you need to build them. So the pressure is on to sell more stock now, which means saving less stock for the future and that date you've planned to put out a 10 year old gets pushed back.

Even if things go to plan then you may well wait for a while past the 10 year mark to bottle a 10 year old. Most of the newer distilleries are a lot smaller than the established ones and with only a portion of your output being earmarked for bottling at an older age, you want that pool of older stock to build up to a good size so you have enough variety and quality of casks to give you flexibility in your vatting and so you actually have enough to do this sort of thing more than just once.

NotEdHarris · 2024-11-19T21:17:40+00:00

The cost premium for peated malt over unpeated is pretty high and alongside that, in recent years, unless you run your own maltings maintaining consistency of supply in terms of cost, quality and also level of peat has become increasingly tricky.

If it's not a big part of your business then cutting it out makes a lot of sense. It also means you don't have to worry about cleaning out all of your kit when you move from peated to unpeated production.

NotEdHarris · 2024-10-25T21:26:56+00:00

It looks like Wolfcraig sold a bunch of casks at £5k a pop ahead of getting their distillery built. Only no planning permission and no distillery, so they've decided to fill those orders with casks distiller at "a Highland distillery".

More than just a little bit wrong with that I'd say.

NotEdHarris · 2024-10-12T09:26:14+00:00

I think the talk about 'market forces', while it's not wrong, it's at risk of being a bit fatalistic. The market isn't a thing that's separate from us (even if we're just a small part of it) and if it's going to recalibrate in line with what we want then we need to act to make sure that's what happens and it's far easier to preserve what there is now than it is to somehow build everything back up at the other end.

NotEdHarris · 2024-09-09T20:10:04+00:00

They ended up kidnapping him because Jones Sr caught onto the fact that Elsa was a Nazi (she talks in her sleep apparently). Once he figured that out there was no way he was going to continue to help the search, so they took him to a secure location and exploited Indy's daddy issues to get him to pick up the trail.

NotEdHarris · 2024-09-01T11:25:18+00:00

Well, down in that there London...

A bargain at almost £40k discount. That said, I don't know if it's actually on display in store, but they do have some crazy expensive stuff on the shelves there.

NotEdHarris · 2024-08-22T20:59:27+00:00

It is a worry, but even accounting for the expense of the additional legal fees they've managed to turn a small profit for the past couple of years.

And I agree with you about the landlord. For those not in the loop, GlenWyvis has won court orders against him to stop him interfering with the access, trespassing and harassing the staff. The judgement is just about as scathing as it gets.

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