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Global Whisk(e)y Aging Inventory

August 2026 · First edition
Next in the series: Kentucky, county by county · Second edition: November 2026

We went looking for global aged whisk(e)y stock levels. No world number existed. So we are building one.

60.4 million
Casks and barrels maturing worldwide
Range 55–68m · Living estimate, revised as data improves
The estimate, country by country

Every figure, with its evidence tier shown.

Only a few entries carry an official count. Everything else is derived, disclosed by producers, or estimated. The tier tells you which, and the whole point of this page is that the uncertainty stays 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 The LYQD Irish Whiskey Supply Report 2026 (analysis Oct 2025, by independent industry analyst Martin Purvis), 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 throughput data and stated assumptions because no usable national maturing-stock aggregate is published.
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.
Full sources, arithmetic and caveats per country: distillerymap.org/whiskey-aging-inventory
Method

Four house rules, applied to every figure.

The estimate is built from official aggregates, producer disclosures, and stated-assumption models, with the arithmetic published. Where a figure is estimated rather than counted, it is asterisked, ranged and labelled as such.

Money is not barrelsA balance-sheet value of maturing whisk(e)y is audited capital, not a cask count. We never convert one into the other without a documented basis.
Capacity is not inventoryA warehouse built for 300,000 barrels is a building. Inventory is what is in it. We count filled casks only.
A state is not a countryKentucky’s much-quoted 17.1m is one state, and it counts all spirits: 16.1m barrels of bourbon plus about a million of everything else. The US national figure is derived separately, so the two do not divide into one another.
Sales are not stockThe world's best-selling whisky category is not the world's largest maturing inventory. What sells today says little about what sits in wood.
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Corrections

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.