Tradition dictates that to properly enjoy a premium whisky it should be served from a thick, elaborate crystal decanter into an overly heavy glass.
Weight has long been an external indicator of quality in the whisky industry and the luxury industry more broadly, but this week Johnnie Walker launched the world’s lightest glass whisky bottle, suggesting the future could be more about reducing emissions than cutting glass.
At 180 grams (6.35 ounces), the teardrop-shaped 70-centilitre glass bottle is considerably lighter than the current 850-gram Johnnie Walker Blue Label bottle (without liquid and stopper), which is one-fifth the conventional weight. It contains a limited edition of Johnnie Walker Blue Label Ultra whisky. The design has been in development for five years and breaks away from the brand’s traditional square bottle for the first time.
Designed with the assistance of Turkish glassmakers. Sisecam—a company that is among the top five glass producers in the world—the new lightweight bottle has the potential to impact both transportation and production emissions. Parent company Diageo suggests that for every gram of glass that is reduced, around half a gram of carbon is saved in production. This doesn’t sound all that impressive, but given that Johnnie Walker sells approximately 130 million bottles a year, the carbon savings could, if scaled up, be considerable.
For now, however, only 888 bottles of the record-breaking Johnnie Walker Blue Label Ultra whisky will be released, priced at $1,250 each – which, as an eco-friendly statement, seems a little symbolic. Limited edition spirits releases are commonplace in the premium sector, but for this innovation to have a significant impact, it will need to be rolled out across more of Diageo’s brands.
For now, lightweight bottles can’t be manufactured on a larger scale, but Jeremy Lindley, Diageo’s global design director, tells WIRED that the company is already applying the new lightweighting know-how to other bottles. “We’ve reduced the weight of the Johnnie Walker 18 Year Old by 35 percent, and we’re working to reduce the weight of our standard Johnnie Walker Blue Label bottle by over 25 percent,” Lindley says.
In the process of developing Johnnie Walker Blue Label Ultra, Diageo obtained four patents in the UK and, in a laudable move, the licence was made available on a royalty-free basis to help encourage other drinks brands to innovate.