Are Casks Worth It? Aged Wine, Cheese and Ale

By Ali Ahmad · Updated October 10, 2026 · Verified for Stardew Valley 1.6.15

What a cask does

A cask holds one aged product and slowly raises its quality. The item starts at normal quality and moves to silver, then gold, then iridium. Each step multiplies the item's normal price: 1.25 for silver, 1.5 for gold and 2 for iridium. The Artisan profession then adds 40% on top, and it applies to everything aged in a cask. That is why an iridium Starfruit wine is exactly twice a normal one.

Only six products can be aged: wine, beer, pale ale, mead, cheese and goat cheese. Make them in a Keg or a Cheese Press as usual, then carry them to the cellar. A cask only works inside the cellar, so you cannot place one on the farm or in a barn. If you need the slot back before the item reaches iridium, you can take it out early with an Axe, Hoe or Pickaxe.

The time per step is fixed for each product. Everything below is the total number of days since you put the item in:

Wine takes two full seasons, which is 56 days. Cheese and goat cheese are the fastest, at two weeks.

What cheese, ale and mead are worth aged

The table shows the price at every step with and without the Artisan profession. "Per cask day" is the extra gold the cask adds each day it is busy, counted from the normal price to iridium.

Goat Cheese is the best product to age after wine: it reaches 1,120g with Artisan in only 14 days. That is about 40g extra a day per cask, more than three times what a Pale Ale earns. Plain Cheese reaches 644g. If you have cows and goats, a cask turns an ordinary stack of cheese into a good extra income without more machines. Large Milk makes gold-quality cheese directly, so a cask only has to do the last step, which takes 7 days for cheese. See the Animal Profit Calculator for what the animals are worth before processing.

Beer, Pale Ale and Mead are the weakest products to age. They are worth 420g or less before aging and earn about 10 to 15 a day per cask, which is why aging them only makes sense once the better products already have a cask each.

Wine: where casks really pay

Wine is worth three times the base price of the fruit it is made from, so a more expensive fruit gains more from the same multiplier. This table shows Artisan wine prices from a normal-quality fruit and what a cask adds:

Starfruit leads at 6,300g for an iridium bottle, and Ancient Fruit follows at 4,620g. They are the two fruits worth planning around, and they are also the two fruits behind the best greenhouses in the Greenhouse Planner. Cheap fruit like Blueberry (420g iridium) or Grape (672g) gains only a few gold per cask day. They are better made into jam or sold, so the cask slot goes to Starfruit.

Casks are an add-on, not a replacement

It is tempting to compare a cask with a Keg directly, but they do different jobs. A Keg turns fruit into wine, and a cask then ages wine that already exists. Look at the numbers for Starfruit with Artisan:

• The Keg turns a Starfruit worth 750g into wine worth 3,150g, an extra 384g a day for each Keg that stays busy.
• The cask doubles that wine to 6,300g, an extra 3,150g over 56 days, or about 56.3 a day for each cask.

So the cask earns far less per day than the Keg, but it is cheap, it needs no fruit and it never stops: a single bottle of Starfruit wine aged to iridium is worth 3,150g more than the same bottle sold straight away. Casks hold the output of your Kegs, so when you have more Kegs than you can empty, the cellar is where the extra wine goes. Keg vs Preserves Jar shows which machine to use for each crop first.

One more result follows from the data. The extra gold per cask day is the same at every quality step: aging Starfruit wine to silver adds 56.3 a day, and so does the step to gold and the step to iridium. That means stopping at gold doesn't waste a slot. If you have more wine than casks, take bottles out at gold and refill with new ones. If you have more casks than wine, leave everything for iridium.

The cellar: size and cost

The cellar comes with the third Farmhouse upgrade. Robin charges 100,000g and takes 3 days to build it. It starts with 33 casks already placed and has room for 189 in total, so you craft the rest yourself. Each cask needs 20 Wood and 1 Hardwood, so filling the cellar means 156 more casks:

• 3,120 Wood
• 156 Hardwood

Hardwood is the scarce material, so the 156 pieces are the real limit. Plan to fill the cellar over several seasons, not at once. The Crafting Calculator adds up the materials for any number of casks.

What a full cellar earns is large: 189 casks of iridium Starfruit wine would add about 595,350g over one 56-day cycle compared with selling the wine at once, and the same number of Ancient Fruit wines about 436,590g. Few farms grow that many fruit in a cycle, so size the cellar to the fruit you really harvest.

What to age first

1. Starfruit and Ancient Fruit wine. Best gold per cask, and the slot is used for the full 56 days.
2. Goat Cheese if you keep goats: 1,120g in two weeks.
3. Pineapple, Melon and Rhubarb wine next, then Cheese.
4. Mead, Beer and Pale Ale only with spare casks.
5. Cheap fruit wine last. Jam or raw sales use fewer slots.

Mistakes to avoid

• Waiting for iridium when you are short of casks. The rate is the same at every step, so take gold bottles out and refill. (You can take an item out early with an Axe, Hoe or Pickaxe.)
• Buying the cellar only for casks. It is a Farmhouse upgrade, and you need the first two upgrades before it, so plan the gold.
• Using Kegs for cheap fruit. A Keg slot is worth more than the cask slot, so keep Kegs on Starfruit and Ancient Fruit and use the cellar for what they make.
• Forgetting Artisan. It adds 40% to everything on this page. Without it, divide the prices above by 1.4.

Related

Know how many Kegs one plant keeps busy in How many kegs do I need?, and see Dehydrators as a faster machine for fruit in Dehydrator vs Keg.

Work it out for your farm

• Keg vs Preserves JarWhich machine earns more for your crop, and how to split your harvest between the kegs and jars you own.
• Crafting CalculatorPick recipes and get one shopping list of ore, wood and stone, with shop prices.

Where these numbers come from

Every number on this page is calculated by the same engine as our calculators, from game data taken from the Stardew Valley Wiki and cross-checked between at least two of its pages (last checked 2026-10-09). See the methodology, and tell us if something looks wrong in your game.

More guides

All tools and guides on this topic: Artisan Goods.

• How Many Kegs Do I Need?Kegs per plant for Hops, Ancient Fruit, Starfruit and more, so no fruit waits in a chest.
• Dehydrator vs KegDried fruit earns far more per machine per day, wine earns more per fruit. Which limit are you at?
• Speed-Gro vs FertilizerCrop by crop: when Speed-Gro adds a harvest, and when fertilizer just costs you gold.
• Are Pigs Worth It?How fast a 16,000g pig pays for itself, and when Truffle Oil beats selling truffles.