We went looking for global aged whisk(e)y stock levels. No world number existed. So we are building one.
Only a few entries carry an official count. Everything else is derived, disclosed by producers, or openly a guess. The tier tells you which, and the whole point of this page is that the guesses stay visible.
| Country | Central | Range | Evidence tier | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 25m | 23–27m | Official aggregate, converted | Converted from a national aggregate: ~1.5 billion proof gallons of American whiskey in inventory at end-2024, at 55–66 proof gallons per filled barrel (DISCUS; Kentucky Distillers’ Association). |
| Scotland | 22m | 21–23m | Officially counted | Physical cask count published by the industry body, the Scotch Whisky Association. |
| Ireland | 4.5m | 4–5m | Private-report estimate | Independent supply study (LYQD, Irish Whiskey Supply Report 2026), corroborated by two lines that share none of its inputs: Drinks Ireland’s published 3.1m casks (2020) rolled forward on flow arithmetic, and a producer bottom-up across Irish Distillers, Great Northern, Bushmills and Waterford bracketing 3.8–4.2m. |
| Canada | 4.3m | 3.9–5.2m | Published partial stock | Published producer floor of 3.9m across four sites, plus an itemised allowance disciplined by a withdrawal-times-residence model. |
| Japan | 2.3m | 1.3–4m | Published partial stock | One reported site (~600,000 casks at Suntory's Ōmi Aging Cellar); national total modelled from NTA tax aggregates. |
| China | 0.75m | 0.6–1m | Published partial stock | Laizhou's listed parent reported nearly 600,000 filled casks at end-2025, scaled by its trade-reported ~80% share of production. |
| India | 0.5m | 0.3–0.9m | Published partial stock | Investor disclosures plus a producer bottom-up across 20+ malt distilleries, bracketing the Indian Malt Whisky Association's 300,000+ barrel figure. |
| Continental Europe | 0.4m | 0.25–0.55m | Published partial stock | Bottom-up across published stock: DYC trade-reported at 170,000 aging casks, High Coast 20,000+, St. Kilian ~10,500, plus a flow model on the INAO's official French production series. |
| Taiwan | 0.15m | 0.1–0.25m | No published figure | Withdrawal-times-residence model on Kavalan's 10m+ bottles a year, plus a reported ~4,500-cask floor at Nantou; capacity is not counted as stock. |
| South Africa | 0.15m | 0.1–0.2m | Published partial stock | James Sedgwick, Africa's major whisky distillery, described as holding 150,000 casks across five warehouses (2018). |
| Rest of world | 0.15m | 0.1–0.3m | No published figure | Order-of-magnitude allowance for everyone not listed above. |
| Australia & Tasmania | 0.1m | 0.04–0.2m | Published partial stock | Lark alone reported 2.5m litres under maturation at 30 June 2025; the national estimate adds a broad allowance across a fragmented industry. |
| England & Wales | 0.05m | 0.05–0.07m | Officially counted | Trade-body forecast of casks maturing, published by the English Whisky Guild. |
| World total | 60.4m | 55–68m | Sum of the entries above. The low case is every regional low at once, not a confidence interval. | |
The estimate is built from official aggregates, producer disclosures, and stated-assumption models, with the arithmetic published. Where a number is a guess, it is labelled as one.
If you hold better data, we would rather publish your number than our estimate.
Write to hello@stillbound.ai with the figure and its basis. Corrections are logged and dated on the evidence page.