Cadenhead Club: A Second Chance

Cadenhead Club: A Second Chance

The first of the new Cadenhead Club bottlings was launched yesterday and promptly sold out in 5 hours – something that we did not foresee happening.  I would, however, like to offer those of you who missed out this time around a Second Chance to get your hands on a bottle.

Yesterday we sold 250 bottles from the Glen Grant 25yo Hogshead. however we are still to bottle the cask so there should be some extra bottles left over once we have finished bottling. We do not expect many bottles but hopefully there will be a Second Chance for a few of you to get a Club Bottle.

Any club member who did not get a bottle can email [email protected] with “Cadenhead Club: A Second Chance” in the header of the email and we will enter you into a draw for a chance to purchase the last of these bottles.  Please note this is only open to existing club members who did not manage to get a bottle yesterday.  The draw will be made after the cask is bottled, therefore the deadline for entering the draw is 5pm (Campbeltown Time) on Wednesday 17th October 2018, and all people who have entered will be emailed, whether they are successful or not, after the draw.

We know that there was a lot of disappointed people yesterday so allow me to take a little time to explain the process of how we we went about things. We have learned a lot and will be taking a lot of your feedback on board for the future.

First of all, the cask that we bottled yesterday was selected by you, the club members, at the end of the tasting in Campbeltown in May therefore we were immediately inclined to bottle it.  The tasting was completely blind and the Glen Grant ended up in a tie with a Butt of Glenrothes which will get bottled as a club bottling in the future.

We really did not expect the demand to be so high for this first release of the new system, hence why we did not bottle the cask prior to it going on sale. We actually had plans in place to send out an email next week to allow people the chance to buy a second bottle as we thought there would be more than enough to go round. However, an interesting fact to consider is that more people managed to get a bottle yesterday than have ever received a club bottling before so we were completely caught off guard by the demand.  Just to reiterate though, no one has been able to get more than one bottle of this – no staff members managed to get a bottle either – not even me!

As this was a new online ordering system we wanted to test the system to make sure that it was working properly, hence why we sent out an email when the whisky went live rather than giving people warning that the whisky would be available at a certain time. Now that we have tested the system and are happy that it works (in fact we got many compliments on how smoothly things worked) for future releases we will give plenty of notice of when things will go live so that people can set up contingency plans to make sure they have a chance of getting a bottle. This should hopefully make things a bit easier for all concerned and mean that everyone has plenty notice.  

All in all, I think things went as well as could be expected for the first time using a new system, we have learned some lessons and things will continue to improve with each release.  Perhaps we will have to work on small batches in the future rather than single casks – or we could water the whisky down to 40% ABV so we get more bottles – only joking!

As a wee reminder to all club members the club is handled from HQ so all correspondence with the club should be directed through [email protected] our shops have no direct control over the club, even though you can have your bottle sent to any of our shops for collection (free of charge).

So a big thank you to all of you who managed to get a bottle yesterday and best of luck to those in the draw.  

Email problems:

Some people stated that they did not receive emails, we can check if you did or not as our email system tracks these things. But to ensure that you do have the best chance of receiving your club emails please – DO THE FOLLOWING:

• Make sure you are definitely a member of the Cadenhead Club – if you are not sure email [email protected]
• Have a look in your spam/junk folder – our email system tries to make sure our emails don’t end up there but it isn’t perfect
• Make sure you have never marked our emails as spam/junk in the past, even by accident – our email system is very nice and considerate so if it thinks you are being bothered by unwanted emails it will stop sending the emails just to be polite.
• Open our emails when we send them – even if you don’t plan on reading them straight away (although we hope you do!) because some email systems “clean” addresses from the system if it thinks that individual never reads the emails

Once you have read the bullet points and investigated the issue yourself, please don’t hesitate to email [email protected] and we will try to help you solve this problem.

Final Disclaimer:

We are very thankful for each and every one of our club members but please remember it is just a bottle of whisky, it is not a life or death situation as to whether you get a bottle or not.  

Yes, we bottle some of the best whisky in the world but some of the abuse that our staff either at HQ or in our shops have had to take from people who didn’t manage to get a bottle has been pretty horrific. Fine have a go at me, I don’t care!  But people harassing staff who are simply doing their jobs and have no control over who gets bottles or not is seriously not on – we have plenty of other whiskies and other spirits available.

The draw will be conducted in a completely fair way – all I am saying is that you will increase your chances of getting a bottle if your nice to us!

Best of Luck!

Mark