Inside the tiny Highland studio that makes beautiful bottles for Scotland’s rarest whiskies

Inside the glass blowing studio (everything here, from pumpkins to vases, is made by hand using age-old techniques) is a cabinet of very eye-catching whisky bottles.

This is where the vessels to house some of Scotland’s oldest and rarest whiskies are made, and it all started as an experiment.

Mr Nairn and Ms Burns set up their studio in 2005 after meeting at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen. What set them on the path of creating some of the most stunning whisky bottles was a request from William Grant & Sons.

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“They didn’t want us to make the (green) bottle, they just wanted us to make some little drinking glasses. They had another company that was going to make the bottle for the 50 year old whisky, and they just couldn’t do it. After about three months they came back to us and said ‘can you have a go?’

“I said ok, being very green and naive I said ‘as long as you pay us’ which they replied ‘of course we’ll pay you’. And that’s how we started out. We made that bottle for Glenfiddich and continued to make it for them for about 17 years until they changed the design.”

On the back of the success with Glenfiddich, the Glasstorm team started making bottles for Balvenie which “got the attention of Bowmore and so on and so forth until we got this amazing cabinet of whisky” said Mr Nairn.

This includes the Macallan 80 year old ‘hands bottle’, the Bowmore 1964 and the Benmorach 50 year old, which has a wonderful pattern created using diamond cuts, a technique that Mr Nairn learned in Murano over 25 years ago. While the bottles are on show, the liquid inside them is not the actual whisky.

“A lot of the products we design ourselves. We’re not just a manufacturer, we’re making a handmade bottle which is incredibly difficult so we engage a design consultancy business to make something extra special,” said Mr Nairn.

There’s nothing more extra special than the Distillers One of One auction, which took place in early October this year. Mr Nairn and his team made a number of the bottles for different whiskies at the auction including The Glenlivet SPIRA 60 year old 1965.

Mr Nairn said: “When you’re making one of these (rare) bottles, you can’t just make one and it’s perfect. In some cases the quality spec and the tolerance is so tight that you have to make 10, 20 or 30.” With The Glenlivet SPIRA, the team made hundreds of bottles just to get the perfect one. One bottle was three millimetres short.

Project manager Gordon Davidson explained: “There’s three lots that we made (for Distillers One of One), the Glenlivet, and Glen Grant were designed by Burgess Studios who we work really closely with on lots of different projects and the final one, the Old Pulteney was entirely designed and created by Glasstorm. It was inspired by the rock formation near the distillery.

“A lot of the time, for example the whisky bottles in the cabinet, there will be a tolerance of where they want the fill height. It can only go to a certain point as you need to have a certain amount of air between the top and the cork.

“There’s a limit to how high the liquid can sit and there’s an aesthetic limit of how low you want it to sit. In the Benromach 50, it was such a small amount of space, something like 10ml of liquid from being ok to not ok. If you transfer that to the distribution of the glass it’s maybe about 40 to 50 grams of glass and that’s the difference between it being too heavy or too light - too heavy the liquid is too low and too light, the liquid is too high. 50g of glass is tiny, especially if you aggregate that over the whole bottle.

“With the Glenlivet, there wasn’t any tolerance on fill height. Because of the shape of the bottle, where the cap sat on it and the balance of it, the spirit had to be above the level where the cap sat and, because it was at an angle, it couldn’t go any higher than that so I think there was maybe three grams between a bottle that was ok and one that wasn’t so it literally had to be perfect. There was almost no wiggle room at all. We had to make 200 of them to get that one perfect bottle. It took an enormous amount of time but was worth it in the end.

“If you find someone, or a company who are willing to go into the realms of art rather than a practical whisky bottler, that makes it really exciting.”

When it comes to the trend of high end whisky and bottles as works of art, Mr Nairn said: “What’s happened is, when a brand engages with us they either just want us to make a handmade bottle because we have the skills to make it or they want to tap into our creative side.

“When we get invited to get creative then we want to push the boundaries of what you think a whisky bottle is. That’s exciting, that’s worth getting up for every morning.”

Find out more about Glasstorm and North Coast Glass via their websites.