Casker

I was searching for a place online that I could buy some rarer bottles when I stumbled upon a fantastic site.  Caskers.com is a plethora of bottles both mundane and unique.  The only drawback to the site I’ve found so far is that it requires you to create a login or use facebook to access the site at all.  Once you’re beyond that hurdle the site is very responsive on both desktop and mobile.

Breaking it down the site has 5 sections.  Firstly is the spirits themselves, a massive list that can be filtered by your location, the spirit type, point of origin and more importantly by in or out of stock.  The least expensive item in their catalog appears to be a $28 bottle of honey flavored vodka and the most expensive a $1000 bottle of 30 year old Balvenie.  I could swear that I’ve seen more expensive and unique bottles that have likely sold out and been removed.

Next up is the clubs.  Much like the current fashion for mail order boxes of unique stuff from places like lootcrate, glambag or Citrus Lane these clubs offer a curated selection of spirits.  Choosing from whiskey, vodka, or spirits you can have up to 4 shipments a quarter sent to your home for about $100-160 per package.  There is also an office option where starting at $250 you can have as many spirits as you want delivered as often as you need.

There is also a line of accessories with everything from drinking horn novelty cups to engraved glassware.

Something I have only seen offered by Jack Daniels is the private cask.  Starting at $1500 you can choose an entire cask of a spirit of your choice and have it custom bottled with your own label, be it for a wedding, graduation, retirement, hunting cabin or private club.  The Jack Daniels option was close to $1000 and generally required a licensed agent to facilitate the transaction, I can only assume caskers is taking on the more boring portions of this in exchange for a higher price tag.

Lastly is their concierge service.  If you’ve ever had a white whale that you couldn’t locate on your own and despaired of having the time and funds to travel to the places that might have what you need then this is the site for you.  Caskers offers a service to track down rare, ultra-premium and small batch products.  There’s no listed prices as this is the kind of service where if you have to ask you probably can’t afford it but I’d be tempted to see if they could find something limited but mundane like the Mt. Vernon rye or Anchor Christmas Spirit.

This site has shown me some very interesting stuff, from a vodka made entirely out of of honey to an absinthe named for Emperor Norton.  I haven’t had the chance to place an order but I’ve played around with their shopping cart and with a shipping cost of only $9.99 for a single bottle and $24.99 for a six bottle case they are more reasonable than several other sites I’ve visited.

Pricing is obviously going to be tricky but on a few items I could compare online they were the same as other web vendors.  For the items that appeared locally on oregonliquorsearch.com the pricing was pretty close with a difference of a few dollars here or there but neither caskers nor the local shops appeared to have the advantage.

The real benefit here is selection.  The internet has not been the boon to liquor sales that you might expect due to the problems of distribution and the costs involved in shipping.  If caskers can offer Lost Spirits, Balcones, or even just a wider selection of small batch major label products then they’re already ahead of anything else I’ve run across.