The Tasting Cask is a premium whisky tasting experience like no other – a fully automated machine that takes users on a digital journey through Bowmore’s brand, heritage and production story, before matching their flavour preferences with a personalised whisky sample.
From the initial concept, generated during an innovation design sprint, through to the finished experience, we were involved every step of the way.
Working closely with world-class production partners, we helped define and design the experience – crafting the visual storytelling and flavour-profiling journey, while also contributing to the physical design and technical delivery of the unit.
The finished result is a seven-foot-tall cylinder with an integrated transparent screen, revealing the robotic dispensing machine behind it. The interaction between these components, brought together through a highly crafted user interface, creates a magical experience that brings Bowmore’s brand proposition, ‘The Art of Time’, to life.
Bringing this innovative idea to life was a complex process.
Using the initial idea from the sprint as our starting point, we explored different formats that the interactive experience could take.
After settling on the concept of a flavour profile builder, we developed a number of visual routes. Some of these included existing brand assets, while others proposed creating new assets inspired by Bowmore’s ‘Art of Time’ brand guidelines.
Our process was closely aligned with the construction of the physical product by our partner, Nakatomi. This included a brand new, untested OLED screen with a unique transparent feature.
The selected concept for the interactive experience utilised a series of slow-motion film clips of the production process and the coastal environment surrounding the distillery on Islay.
These were curated into a visual story, overlaid with a stripped-back, typography-led user interface. Careful consideration was given to the interplay between the transparent feature of the screen and the robotic component that sat behind it.
A feeling of perpetual movement was created through the transitions of the films, typography and the robot.
I loved the challenge of choreographing the different components, technologies and teams that went into its production.
