How Cask-It™ Got Its Name

Some of the best things in life start in the worst moments.

Cask-It™ came from grief. Not the kind that breaks you, but the kind that makes you want to build something that lasts. Something that carries a name forward.

Anne's mum passed away a few years back. She was Stewart's mum too, of course. Her name was Anne, same as my wife, and if you knew her for five minutes you understood immediately where Anne got her fire from. She was a Glasgow woman through and through. Sharp as a tack, quick with a line, and absolutely zero tolerance for nonsense. She didn't drink, which in a family that has made whisky something of a vocation is either ironic or perfectly balanced, depending on how you look at it. But she was always there. Always at the table. Always the funniest person in the room, usually at someone else's expense, and always with that look on her face that said she knew exactly what was going on and found it mildly ridiculous.

Her husband was David. Big D, we called him. He was the kind of man who filled a room without trying. Between the two of them, they raised a family that knew how to laugh, how to argue, how to sit around a table for hours and make it feel like the best place on earth.

Stewart and I came up with the name Cask-It™ one evening after she was gone. We were doing what we always do when things get heavy: we poured something good and we talked. Stewart is in the whisky business, has been for years, and he knows his way around a dram better than almost anyone I've met. He pulled out something special that night, as he always does, and we sat with it.

We wanted to build something. A guide to Scotland's whisky country, the places we'd been, the distilleries we'd visited, the pubs we'd sat in on cold nights with the rain coming down outside and something peated and warm in the glass. A place where people could find what we'd found over years of exploring this country together.

Cask-It™. It's a play on words, obviously. You cask whisky. You casket the dead. We didn't say that part out loud at first, but it was there. A nod to Anne's mum, who would have told us we were being overly sentimental and then laughed at us for it. And to Big D. And to all the nights that made this family what it is.

This site is for them. And for everyone who loves Scotland, loves whisky, and loves the people you drink it with.

My wife Anne is from Glasgow. Her brother Stewart Hunt runs whisky tours across Scotland. My sister-in-law Liz is the sensible one of our group, which can be a ridiculous role in itself, but she is the cornerstone of everything we do. The four of us have been doing this for years, finding the places, drinking the drams, sitting in the pubs, and making the memories that eventually turned into this site.

Anne's mum would have had something to say about all of it. Something funny, something pointed, and something that would have made us all laugh. She was that kind of woman.

We built this for her. And for Big D. And for every cold night in a warm Scottish pub that made us who we are.