5 reasons why your Delivery Order is taking so long

6 November 2024

Congratulations – You’ve just bought yourself a new whisky cask. 

You have your invoice, receipt, and signed purchase agreements and you’re now just waiting on the Delivery Order (DO) from the seller to confirm the transfer of title. You wait and wait and it’s been several weeks (sometimes even months) and still no sign of the DO. So what gives?

There could be a perfectly good reason why your DO is taking so long to arrive. Here, we name a few:

• Accessibility: Scotland has over 31,000 freshwater lochs, 3 major mountain ranges (Highlands, Central Lowlands and the Southern Uplands) and over 790 islands. It’s a beautiful country with incredible landscape but also a logistical nightmare for a warehouse truck to pick up and deliver precious, large cargo where the roads are windy, narrow, steep and feature several blind corners. Add in hundreds of warehouses across Scotland with limited delivery companies and you have a recipe for slower logistics.
• Warehouse Handling Procedures: Credit where credit is due. HMRC-approved Warehouses do a lot of work. Many articles and brokers may make it seem that signing over a cask is quite easy (sorry warehouse keepers) but the reality is that HMRC places a lot of responsibility on warehouses including (but not limited to): 
• Objectively assessed for duty fraud and tax evasion 
• Place procedures to mitigate tax fraud
• Document checks and audit that safety measures are being followed
• Complete ‘Health Checks’ with businesses and intermediaries that are doing business with the warehouse
• Assess the financial health of customers 
• Assess prices of casks
• Assess transportation methods

…the list goes on but if you’re keen to know everything that warehouses have to do, you can find it all HMRC Excise Notice 196 and 2002. Be warned it’s a snooze-fest.

The point is, there’s a lot of paperwork involved in processing casks in bond and it only takes a few requests for the queues to back up.

• Warehouse Infrastructure: You may or may not be surprised to learn that many cask warehouses are massive and offer hundreds of thousands of racking space for cask storage and maturation. This extends to casks being stacked and palletised upon one another making access difficult. Unlike your modern-day Amazonesque packaging and storage facilities, management of these warehouses can be quite manual and labour-intensive which adds considerable time for the movement of casks. 
• Warehouse tasks: Amongst handling the paperwork, warehouses do serve other functions besides moving and processing casks. This includes things like routine inspections, bottling, labelling, packaging, regauging and re-racking casks (the act of shifting whisky from one container to another). Depending on the warehouse, the availability of labour will play a large part in how quickly things get done.
• Intermediary Processing: If you’re buying a cask via a broker or similar intermediary it’s not unusual for this cask to be coming from an indirect source. This is common if there’s a hard-to-find cask or a specific request that your seller doesn’t have which means the cask may have to move (at least on paper) a couple of times before it is finally settled into its destination. This should not be confused with the intentional withholding of a DO – this, in our opinion, is poor practice.

We hope the above provides some context as to why a DO for your cask may take some time and in fact, it’s quite normal for DOs to take a bit of time. Fortunately, the market is moving towards more openness to cask movements and storage. Feel free to learn about how CaskNet is moving towards market transparency here (Article coming soon).

If you have any queries about your DO or would like to learn more, drop us a line and we’ll be happy to schedule a call.