Tradition dictates that to properly enjoy premium whisky, you pour it from a large crystal decanter into a super-heavy glass.
Weight has long been an external indicator of quality in the whisky industry, and luxury In general, this is a huge challenge for the industry, but this week, Johnnie Walker launched the world’s lightest glass whisky bottle, suggesting that the future will focus more on reducing emissions than cutting out glass.
Weighing 180 grams (6.35 ounces), the teardrop-shaped 70-centilitre glass bottle is significantly lighter than the 850 grams of the current Johnnie Walker Blue Label bottle (without liquid and stopper), one-fifth the traditional weight. It houses the limited-edition Johnnie Walker Blue Label Ultra whisky. The design has been five years in the making, and marks the first time it deviates from the brand’s traditional square bottle.
Designed with the help of Turkish glassmakers sisecamFor Diageo – a company that is among the top five glass producers worldwide – the new lightweight bottle has the potential to impact both transport and production emissions. Parent company Diageo suggests that every gram of glass reduced saves around half a gram of carbon in production. That doesn’t sound very impressive, but given that Johnnie Walker sells an estimated 130 million bottles annually, the carbon savings could be substantial if scaled up.
For now, however, only 888 bottles of the record-breaking Johnnie Walker Blue Label Ultra whisky will be released, priced at $1,250 per bottle – which, environmentally speaking, feels a bit pretentious. Limited-edition spirits releases are commonplace in the premium sector, but this innovation will need to be rolled out across more Diageo brands to have a meaningful impact.
At the moment, the size of the lighter bottles can’t be increased, but Jeremy Lindley, Diageo’s global design director, tells WIRED that the company is already applying its new knowledge of lighter-weight bottles to other bottles. “We’ve reduced the weight of Johnnie Walker 18-Year-Old by 35 percent, and we’re working on reducing the weight of our standard Johnnie Walker Blue Label bottle by more than 25 percent,” says Lindley.
In the process of developing Johnnie Walker Blue Label Ultra, Diageo was granted four UK patents, and in a commendable move, the licences have been made available on a royalty-free basis, to encourage other drinks brands to innovate.
