Cheers! Long-Forgotten Cask of Rare Scotch Sells For Mind-Boggling Sum

Forget about real estate or tech stocks: The best investment is in Scotch.

A forgotten cask of The Macallan from 1988 just sold at auction for a record-breaking sum of nearly $1.3 million. The cask was purchased some 34 years ago by an absent-minded drinker who paid $6,275 for it, yet never turned up to collect it. The distiller sold it Sunday to an unidentified American buyer through the online auction site Whisky Hammer.

“When this cask was listed in our auction, we knew it had the potential to make history,” said Daniel Milne, Whisky Hammer’s founder. “To come across a cask of this age, quality and size is extraordinary in itself, enhanced by the fact the liquid was distilled at The Macallan which is reflected in the global attention the cask has attracted.”

A forgotten cask of whisky sold at auction for C$1.48 million, distilled in 1988 at The Macallan distillery, one of Scotland’s oldest distilleries. The 374-litre cask contains enough scotch to fill 534 bottles of Old Macallan Whisky, it sold to a private individual in the U.S. pic.twitter.com/pkEwRO00yI

— Freddie Saxon (@WordsmithSaxon) April 28, 2022

The cask holds about 534 bottles’ worth of whiskey, which works out to $2,426 apiece. That breaks the per-bottle record for a cask, topping a smaller Macallan barrel auctioned in 2021 for $572,000, according to Food & Wine.