York Whisky Club

Join fellow whisky lovers based in & around York

Charity Fundraising

2025 – Back raising money for St Leonard’s Hospice

Spring is here – time to smell the fresh air, sip some delicious whisky and be generous!

After raising £2,853.37 for St Leonard’s Hospice with Dream Drams II and some penguin antics and having raised a total of £3,403.37 for charity in 2024, we weren’t going to stop there. We are continuing to support the great work of the hospice, but we know that charitable giving can be extra enjoyable whilst sipping a best-of-2024 five dram set from Caskshare.

Having given away one over Christmas (won by Ethan), now it’s time to give away another!

Ready to play (donate)?

It would be boring to just give the set away without some healthy giving competition, so….

  • Every donation in March and April gets you 1x draw entry ticket
  • If you attend either our March Cinema tasting (15th March, tickets) or our April tasting (26th April, International Drams) you get 1x draw entry
  • If the donations equals or is over £15, you get an extra 1x draw entry
  • If the donations equals or is over £25, you get 2x extra draw entries
  • If the donations equals or is over £50, you get 4x extra draw entries

e.g. Donate £30 and attend our March tasting, and you get 4 entries – 1x entry (Donation), 2x entries (Donation over £25), 1x entry (Attended March tasting)

We’ll do the draw on the night at the end of the April tasting.

>>> DONATE ON OUR JUST GIVING PAGE <<<

2024- Total raised: £3,403.37

£550 raised for Blameless

When we teamed up with Scotch Whisky Auctions to put on an Autumn tasting, we saw an opportunity to start putting our charity impact plans into action. We were able to raise £550 for Blameless, their nominated charity, and one which provides fun times, happy memories and a vision of hope for the future for children and families affected by alcoholism and addiction.

£2,853.37 raised for St Leonard’s Hospice

We wanted to go further and decided to devote our Christmas tasting, Dream Drams II to raising money for York-based St Leonard’s Hospice who provide care and support for terminally ill people, and people with life-limiting illnesses.

We first ran Dream Drams in 2023 – a tasting designed to introduce people to whisky that they’d be unlikely to get hold of such as sold-out first releases, old and rare or exclusive, expensive and limited editions that end up being hoarded by collectors. Everyone loved it – we presented 7 whiskies with a combined retail cost of 3 times the ticket revenue and it was our quickest ever sellout.

Thanks to the generosity of Caskshare, Woodrow’s of Edinburgh, Cooper King, The Whisky Exchange, Thompson Bros at Dornoch Distillery, The Whisky Lounge, The Spirit of Yorkshire and The Scotch Malt Whisky Society, plus the UNBELIEVABLE generosity of all attendees, we managed to raise OVER £2000 for this worthy cause, through ticket sales, auctioning the remaining spirit and some fun but at times confusing in-tasting side quests.

With GiftAid, a social media tasting set promotion and one of the York Whisky Club hosts, Jasper, donning a penguin outfit for a freezing boxing day dip in Whitby, we added more contributions eventually topping out the year with a total of £2,853.37 raised for the charity.