Hey guys, a nice idea but......
..
....a 250 litre hogshead will contain around 160 Litres of pure alcohol for £1600. That's £10 per litre of alcohol and you tie up your money for 10 years before its matured to a reasonable level. You may need to add the cost of insurance and storage to that as well. Do not consider this to be in any way a sound investment buying at the prices originally mentioned. You'll get good whisky to enjoy at something like trade prices but that is about it.
The yield from that cask after 10 years will be around 120 litres of pure alcohol with the angels having swallied the balance during maturation. The strength at that point will be in the high 50's% so at cask strength will yield ~ 300 x 70cl bottles (based on 58%). These are all estimates as every cask is different but as it is what I do for a living believe me when I say that they are pretty reliable ones. The distilleries quote bottle yields at normal mass market strengths of 43%, chill filtered
Current trade prices for matured spirit are between £1 and £2.50 per litre of pure alcohol x the number of years its been matured. So a good malt, maybe not the most sought after Islays or Macallan, at £2 per litre of alcohol you could buy a 5 year old cask for the price you're talking about and only need to mature it for another 5 years.
Alternatively form a bigger syndicate and buy casks ready to bottle. I can supply lists with hundreds of casks ffrom most distilleries aged between 0 (new fills) and 30+ years old. We also have bottling losses that are among the lowest in in the industry.
Regards Packer, (specialist single cask whisky bottler and packer)
P.S. I'm off to Stockholm this month to talk to a couple of thousand whisky mad Swedes/Noresemen/Fins about this very subject. Which reminds me, I better learn a bit about it