There are at least five distilleries that produce whisky continuously in Finland. Many distilleries means many options to get your own cask from Finland. It’s also a traditional way to finance future of young distillery. Nice example of this is Swedish distillery Mackmyra. Best choices in Finland are available from Helsinki Distilling Company and Teerenpeli Distillery.  If I add together all the figures I have heard about sold private casks, there are more than 1000 casks in Finland maturing, which is quite a lot! We certainly are whisky people!

Last week I was part of the group that got our very own cask from Helsinki Distilling Company. We wanted to have cask of Finnish rye whisky. Because of that we had only two options to choose from. We arranged blind tasting earlier where we discussed about from which distillery we will get the cask, Kyrö or HDCO. In the end Kyrö offered only their smoky rye spirit and not option to come to fill the cask by ourselves, so we decided to choose Helsinki Distilling Company which had many options to choose from and we got to fill the cask by ourselves. In my opinion, part of getting the cask is the experience and feeling that the cask is like your own baby. If you can’t get it with the purchase, you may just go to the store and buy equal amount of bottles from shelve.

We chose to fill our cask with 55 liters of 100% rye spirit. Other possibilities would have been 100% barley and 70% rye / 30% barley mix. There were also lots of choices with the cask and size of it, even Bulgarian oak. Our choice was new French oak. We plan to mature our whisky five years but of course we will try it at least couple times a year to see if it’s ready earlier. One more neat add to the experience is cask owner parties that we have right to participate.

What about the price then? Unfortunately Finnish casks are bit expensive compared to some prices I know from Scotland, but I think they are worth paying for. At least, if you want world’s best rye whisky, I believe Finland is going to be the place to get it. I have compared in the table below liter prices of spirit in ~60l casks, which seem to be quite basic combination. Because of the Finnish alcohol laws, one needs to buy final bottles from Alko and pay taxes and with extra costs. This calculation doesn’t include those costs, but they are approximately same(22-25€/0,5l bottle).

What can you get

Like I mentioned, some distilleries offer lots of choices and some only one option. I tried to summarize all the choices in table below. If you are thinking of getting own cask from Finland, I am more than happy to help or you can contact distilleries directly!