With the advent of summer, whisky makers have begun to concoct a new summer-appropriate product: whisky cocktails.

Jack Daniel's's new pre-mixed cocktails are making a comeback, followed by a couple of other pre-mixed cocktails.

I don't know if you've noticed, but whether it's these two companies, or Suntory and other Japanese manufacturers that have been involved in bottling Highball for a long time, their whiskey cocktails are often served in 350-mL cans, whisky itself is often in a 700ml glass bottle (or a 1L glass bottle from a duty-free shop) .

The cocktail can into a good understanding: can the arc is very good, very in line with the product positioning. But why would the industry choose“700ml” of“Glass bottles” as the standard packaging of whiskey?

1、Bottled material

There are several reasons why glass bottles are used by default in the industry.

Alcohol (ethanol) is oxidized to form acetone, which, even in small amounts, can severely damage the quality of the wine in the bottle. Therefore, the plastic bottles that allow oxygen to pass through are the first to be ruled out (especially PET bottles, which is why coke in glass bottles/cans tastes better than coke in plastic bottles!) .

The entire plastic bottle industry has thousands of patents behind it, trying to use a variety of coatings to help ventilate the problem. A couple of days ago saw on a hundred bottles that Diageo's North American subsidiary was pioneering the use of 100% recycled plastic bottles in the U. S. Whisky brand Schlender's product line.

Have a bottle friend in the United States, to see if Diageo has a good solution to the problem of plastic bottles breathable!

Also excluded is the porous ceramic material.

Below, GRAFTI and Wedgwood collaborated on a ceramic bottle. Nice as they are, and as much as collectors love them, ceramics are a poor candidate for long-term storage because of their porous nature.

What about metal?

Stainless steel has been used in the liquor industry to store spirits for more than a century.

Scots often drink on the beach, on a boat or while camping, for portability and safety (the glass is fragile and the flask can even be bulletproof) , and they don't carry bottles if they have a choice, but will use stainless steel flask.

I don't see a direct explanation for the lack of stainless steel packaging in textbooks like Whisky: Technology, production and marketing, or in recent scientific papers. But between the lines, it is not hard to see that this is more or less because of“Industry habits.”.

Previously, glass bottles must be hand-produced high-grade materials, and high-grade spirits in line with the positioning. Remember Steve McClaren's six-pillar collection, where good-looking glass bottles and pricey wine went hand in hand.

By contrast, I only see the picture below of a tin can of whiskey. The packaging style of the last century makes it look and feel like a chemical reagent, making it hard to buy.

But in other words, in the spirit of the“Standard” packaging are glass bottles, the use of carefully designed metal packaging instead can better show their own“Maverick”.

There is a British Gin producer named Gin in a Tin (Gin in a can) , and the texture of these Tin cans is really beautiful. As a latecomer in the industry, always need such a bright spot or two for marketing.

2、Bottled volume

In fact, for a long time, there was no uniform volume. It was not until 1993 that the European Union introduced the 700ml“Standard” bottle to eliminate the confusion of the many types used previously. Note that 700ml is the EU's“Standard”, whereas the US standard size is 750ml.

As to why 700ml was chosen, the data suggested that it was related to how many bottles of whisky could be extracted from a barrel. But a careful analysis, we can easily find it is also a“Compromise” tradition. First of all, the barrels vary in size, and usually the wine and Shirley barrels are much larger than the Bourbon barrels, not to mention the pig's head barrels. Secondly, the whiskey ripening process, each year has been called“Angel's share” of the original wine evaporation. Different Wood, different barrel-making methods, different years, the loss of mature angel share is also different. Finally, there is the alcohol content of the original wine, and the final bottled alcohol content of these two variables.

Let's say, for example, graphically. According to the data, we can assume that we are using 200-liter bourbon barrels for maturation.

After 12 years of ripening, there are 175 litres of whisky left in the cask with an alcohol content of about 55-60% . The manufacturer diluted the original wine to 40% -43% alcohol content before bottling. This barrel of Bourbon can hold 150 to 250 bottles of whiskey. Well, it's just such an estimate with a huge margin of error.

3、Summary

I started this article with the question“Why is the standard bottle of whiskey a 700ml glass bottle?”. Here, I found that whether it is a 700ml bottle or a glass bottle, there is no clear reason, can only be said to be years of marketing decisions, selling the best“Formula.”.

 And since 700ml bottles are not the only solution, as mentioned earlier, manufacturers can work on packaging, play their own unique insights. Especially in today's world of“Healthy drinking” and“Rational drinking,” small bottles, or bottled whisky cocktails, are likely to be more common on everyday shelves.