Keeping Whisky Safe

By Maltmannie

Keeping your whisky safe is important to anyone with even a half bottle of supermarket own brand whisky. You can imagine how much more important it is for distilleries! I shall do a series of posts about keeping whisky safe, starting with this one about keeping whisky safe in distillery warehouses.

Twin Padlocked Warehouse

The Challenges For Distilleries Keeping Their Whisky Safe

Quite apart from having to keep their bottled whisky safe, which I will explore in another post. Distilleries need to keep their maturing whisky safe in the warehouse. Distilleries need to keep their whisky safe from potential thieves, but also from the exciseman’s clammy hands!

The distillery must pay duty on all whisky taken out of the warehouses, the exciseman must ensure that this is adhered to.

The exciseman must be given access to the warehouses where the whisky matures. The distillery must also have access to their maturation warehouse. This raises the issue of mutual trust between distillery and exciseman.

Keeping Whisky Safe From Both Distilleries And Excisemen

The solution is actually very simple indeed. Each warehouse has two padlocks securing it. The distillery manager holds the key to one padlock and the exciseman holds the other. In this simple way both parties are assured that the other cannot remove the precious whisky that lies within the warehouses. The picture in this post was taken by my good lady wife at Glengarioch Distillery Oldmeldrum.