Johnnie Walker debuts world’s lightest whisky bottle

Creating the Johnnie Walker Blue Label Ultra bottle took five years: with the design team allowed to ‘explore without limitation and imagine what the future of lightweight luxury packaging could bring’. That led them to a teardrop shape and a design that Diageo has already patented.

At 180g (without stopper) for the 70cl bottle, that’s much less than the current 850g for a Johnnie Walker Blue Label bottle. Other whiskey bottles are typically in the range of 400g – 1000g.  

Back to basics​

Five years ago, the Johnnie Walker team set out with a ‘test-and-learn-approach’, exploring all aspects of how bottles are designed, made and transported. That included hand-blowing glass and turning to the new teardrop shape.

The Johnnie Walker Blue Label Ultra bottle – ‘which showcases what luxury, lighter-weight, lower carbon bottles of the future could look like’ - was unveiled at the London Design Festival last weekend.

“We took our vision to a team of expert glassmakers and throughout a five year test-and-learn process slowly discovered how to create elegant, lightweight glass,” said Jeremy Lindley, Diageo Global Design Director.

“The technical challenges that lightweighting presents led us to incorporate various design and production specifications that we could not have envisaged at the start of our journey; from the requirement of a teardrop shape which we have molded to still mimic the iconic square form of Johnnie Walker bottles, to the addition of a protective cage to allow for a round base, and the hand-making and filling of each individual bottle to avoid damages in production."

While the eye-catching bottle may do a good job at wooing designers, the practical limitations (such as the curved base, which requires a wooden cage structure to support the bottle in pack) make it a lot less practical for stocking on shelves or maximizing space during transportation.

And the bottle is, at the moment, a small-scale production effort limited to this production run (“We would need to completely re-design glassmaking at scale to handle the delicate nature of the bottle across production, filling and transport, which would be a cross-industry challenge,” Lindley told us).

Only 888 bottles have been produced, and they’ll be released for sale in 2025 in select markets around the world.

But the tech shows what can be achieved. 

Cutting down the weight of the glass means less glass needs to be produced in the first place - saving the energy of producing and recycling glass. There are also then the emissions saved in transportation (a lighter bottle helps create a lighter load). 

“Actual carbon savings from lightweighting would be project and product dependent, but in general, independent studies show that (all else being equal) for every gram of glass reduced that means over half a gram less carbon emissions in production,” explained Lindley.

“That knowledge that Johnnie Walker has garnered is already being applied to lightweighting projects across the Diageo portfolio.”

Diageo has been granted a UK patent and says that – in an effort to support wider lightweighting efforts – it will offer a license to the patent on a royalty-free basis to anyone in the world who wants to share in the discoveries.

That will help other companies discover the potential of the bottle.

How low can you go?

Champagne Telmont believes it's produced the lightest ever Champagne bottle​, coming in at 800g - around 35g lighter that today's standard bottles.

That might sound heavy in comparison to whisky, but Champagne bottles have to be stronger to withstand the pressure of the bubbles.

And, in 2021, AB InBev announced it had created the lightest beer bottle in the world​: with a new bottle design that reduced the weight of the standard longneck beer bottle from 180g to 150g.