Glass bottles serve several practical functions: they keep air out. They let you see the color of the drink you’re buying. They allow things like whiskey to be sold in consumer-friendly quantities, unlike barrels. But on top of those concerns, they also serve a marketing function.
Walk into a liquor store, and most bottles on the shelves have the same basic shape. Distilleries can make their products stand out with a unique label or a distinctive box or tin—or they can go the whole nine yards and use a bespoke bottle that will stand out from across the room. Here are five of the most unusual, eye-catching bottles in whiskey:
Dime Box Distillery Sixth Street Bourbon
This whiskey gets its name from Austin, Texas’s historic entertainment district, and the guitar-shaped bottle, complete with a metal guitar pick, was designed to evoke Austin’s honky-tonk scene. That’s about where the connection with Austin ends—it’s an MGP-distilled whiskey bottled by a company based not in Austin but in tiny Dime Box, Texas. Nonetheless, the bottle won an award last year!
Michael Reed, the founder of American Barrels readily admits that his brand is more about the bottle than what’s in it. The idea for this shotgun shell-shaped monstrosity materialized when Reed realized that “shot” can refer to both the stuff you shoot from a shotgun and a specific quantity of booze. Improbably, the Gadsden Flag was hanging behind the bar he happened to be in when he discovered this pun. Thus was born a cartoonishly American marketing ploy perfect for slapping onto a thoroughly mediocre whiskey.
Rocker is another example of a spirits brand whose inception was more about a bottle than an actual drink. The inspiration for this unusual bottle was a 1930s-era oil can with cleverly-placed handles, and the idea is that you can tilt it over on the round face, then rock it back onto the flat part.
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Gold Bar Gold-Finished Whiskey
I may have fallen asleep more than once in high school chemistry, but I do remember picking up that gold is inert. You’d think that would mean finishing whiskey in gold-plated barrels, as Gold Bar does, wouldn’t do a damn thing. You’d be wrong: it does the only thing that really matters, which is creating an illusion of luxury that people will pay handsomely for.
Appropriately, the bottle is also gold-plated, and shaped (duh) like a gold bar. Since the bottom is slanted, it comes with a clear plastic stand that lets you display it upright, and really hammer home the nouveau riche decorating statement you’re trying to make. Doubles as a mirror.
In many cases, a custom bottle can be a way to market an otherwise uninteresting whiskey; in others, producers have spectacular bottles made for spectacular whiskeys. This whiskey from bottler Gordon & MacPhail fits into the second category. It’s an “extraordinary” 75-year-old expression from Mortlach in Speyside, and it comes in a teardrop-shaped crystal decanter that looks like it was imported from Rivendell.
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