Tradition dictates that to properly enjoy a premium whisky you pour it from an elaborately chunky crystal decanter into an unfeasibly heavy tumbler.
Weight has long been an outward signifier of quality in the whisky industry, and the luxury industry in general, but this week, Johnnie Walker launched the world’s lightest glass whisky bottle, suggesting that the future might be more about cutting emissions that cut glass.
At 180 grams (6.35 ounces), the teardrop shaped 70-centiliter glass bottle is considerably lighter than the 850 grams of the current Johnnie Walker Blue Label bottle (without the liquid and the stopper), coming in at one-fifth of the conventional weight. It contains a limited-edition Johnnie Walker Blue Label Ultra whisky. The design has been five years in the making, and it breaks with the brand’s traditional square bottle for the first time.
Designed with the help of Turkish glassmakers Şişecam—a company in the top five of glass producers globally—the new lightweight bottle has the potential to impact both transport and production emissions. Parent company Diageo suggests that for every gram of glass reduced, around half a gram of carbon is saved in production. This doesn’t sound all that impressive, but given Johnnie Walker sells an estimated 130 million bottles annually, the carbon savings could, if upscaled, be considerable.
For now, however, only 888 bottles of the record-breaking Johnnie Walker Blue Label Ultra whisky will be released, costing $1,250 each—which, as eco-statements go, feels a little tokenistic. Limited-edition spirit releases are commonplace in the premium sector, but for this innovation to make a meaningful impact it will need to be implemented across more Diageo brands.
At present, the lightweight bottles cannot be scaled up, but Jeremy Lindley, global design director at Diageo, tells WIRED that the company is already applying the newfound light-weighting knowledge to other bottles. “We have brought down the weight of the 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 over 25 percent,” Lindley says.
In the development process for the Johnnie Walker Blue Label Ultra, Diageo was granted four UK patents, and, in a laudable move, the license has been made available on a royalty-free basis to help encourage other drinks brands to innovate.