Goodbye, Das Cask, and Thanks for All the Fun

On April 30 2022, I closed down all operations on Das Cask, the little whisky business I had started in 2016 together with my then business partner and now good friend Marcel.

Ever since I discovered whisky and fell in love with it, I was always intrigued by the idea of owning your own cask of whisky. When I decided to start a business around whisky, I realized that there were so many new distilleries and whiskys coming onto the market that I would be small fish no. 396 on the retailers’ shelves. The idea of a bespoke whisky in your own cask, though, that was much more unique and rather exciting.

We incorporated the business in 2016, brought in 90.000 € ourselves and took a bank loan for the same amount to get started.

The original idea, which would have been quite a bit more expensive, had been to build an actual distillery, based on the assumption that:

1. People wanted to buy a cask from an actual distillery, because that was sort of the trend at that time.
2. Nobody in Scotland or here in Germany would sell us New Make spirit. The Scots were jaleously guarding their brands and only established bottlers with old contracts had acccess to unaged spirit in bulk, and the German distilleries simply weren’t producing enough to have something to sell at a competitive price.

When the bank refused to fund it all in one go, we initially thought we’d never be able to build this idea.

Then through a contact, we got in touch with a distillery that shall rename unnamed and after quite a bit of back and forth and convincing and showing up there in person, they agreed to ship me two kinds of alcohol: unpeated spirit and heavily peated spirit. This breakthrough let us start with much less capital, since we now merely needed a cask maturation warehouse without the expensive distilling equipment.

One of my original ideas was that by mixing peated and unpeated spirit, you could create a spirit that was just as peaty and smoky as you liked it. Combining that with a few different types of casks (which many other providers of private casks offered), this would give every customer a truly unique whisky. And since both spirits came from the same distillery, the end result would be a single malt, which I felt was very important.

Armed with 1.000 litres of each type of spirits, we set out to create a palette of standard combinations that prospective customers could try out to get a feel for the possibilities, before possibly fine-tuning the mix. I sent out an email to a few networks I was part of, offering to hold a tasting for free at someone’s house for small groups of 5 people at most, and got a few replies back. Most of those would not only become customers when we started operations much, much later (more on that later), but many of them even turned into repeat customers, which was a tremendous validation of the quality of our product and of our concept.

We started renting a space in Berlin-Neukölln in January 2018. Because we were going to store large amounts of alcohol at about 63% abv., we had to file for a new permit with the authorities, focusing on fire safetey measures. In Berlin, you have to appoint a specialist to approve your plans and then later inspect the planned changes you make to the site (fire-proof ceilings and doors, an additional exit, fire extinguishers etc.), and the one we ended up with turned out to be extremely pedantic. It took us 18 months and 52 certificates of various kinds to receive the approval to operate.

In July 2019 we finally received the green light, having started to fill the first pre-ordered casks in May based on a pre-authorisation.

We grew slowly but steadily until the pandemic hit in March 2020. The month before had been our best so far with three casks sold, but our entire sales model of sitting down with the customer got taken away from us over night.

It took a bit of time but we finally managed to transpose the experience online. We would send out small sample sets and guide the customers through the tasting using video conferencing. The customers would tell us their choices and we’d send out a second box with the bespoke mixes they wanted, or with samples from some of our own example casks. The conversion rate dropped from one order in about two tastings to something that wasn’t statistically measurable. The online experience failed to replicate the conditions for the kind of bond we had with our first customers, and I kept calling up customers asking them whether they were interested in placing an order or not, with little success. A private cask of whisky is not exactly a “bleeding neck” type of pain marketers talk about, and people took their sweet time making their decisions.

The drawn-out fire safety authorisation and the pandemic were too much for our small, slightly under-capitalised business, and in March 2022, we filed for bankruptcy, after having produced 36 casks in total, 28 of which belonged to our customers. In April 2022, we vacated the warehouse and personally handed out every single cask to our customers, even driving some of them as far as to the Netherlands ourselves, to ensure a smooth delivery and thank them once more for their trust.

I’m not sad the business failed. It was a beautiful idea and a superior product and I’m immensely proud of what Das Cask had become. I built it all on the side, keeping my job throughout the entire time, so my capacity was limited. The pandemic really hit our little family with two children hard. It feels I never quite recovered to my previous levels of energy and creativity until this day. Given the challenges, I don’t feel bad at all for not having made it. Today I’m mostly relieved. I can free up some of my mental capacity to be more present with my family, and returning full-time to my job means I’ll be more productive there.

I’m extremely grateful to my friends and to my mom who helped me with more than just good thoughts, as well as to my wife D who let me tread my path without ever questioning it or criticising my absences in the evenings. My employer and team at work showed amazing compassion and patience when stress levels got a little out of hands. Marcel has been a wonderful early investor and believer from the start and I’m happy to count him among my good friends now.

Now it’s time to move on. I’ve reached the mid-point in my life, so there’s quite a bit of work and projects ahead to look forward to.