Balvenie Prototypes continued
We’ve been at it again! At the request of the Global Balvenie team, we were asked to create a few more prototypes for them.
The first of which was a cheese board set.
Whisky and cheese go hand in hand in our book. Pairings, contrasts, flavour journeys and afternoons spent around the kitchen table talking to friends with a mount between us and a bottle of Portwood 21 have been a common sight around the Anonymous Artists HQ. It’s a traditional, joyous pairing.
The challenge for The Balvenie’s cheese and whisky set was not only to find the best combinations but to decide which tools to provide people to enjoy the tucking in with. Leaning on the brand’s craft heritage, we chose to overkill on the functionality of the utensils and look at woodworking tools.
The idea behind using craft tools, knives and measuring devices was to create a symbolic link between the type of person who shares the brand’s affinity for craftsmanship and who, like us, use a lot of these items in the workshop. After all we’ve all been there, using a chisel to skewer a stray item of lunch and scoffing down… If it’s the craftsmen’s whisky, then surely, this is the craftsman’s cheese board.
Once the feast is fully over, time for the games to begin. Here is a customized backgammon roll we created. There are two sizes made so that they could choose which they prefer. Both are roll-ups using swede and leather and each playing piece has had The Balvenie logo etched into it.
The reason they were designed this way was so that they could be portable and travel ready, making them an ideal value added gift item for the brand to provide in travel retail departments.
All this talk of cheese, whisky and playing board (swede in our case) games made us think of how we would interpret the last of the traditional whisky territory items; the Cigar. What to do for the case was a easy decision – The Balvenie is one of the last distilleries to still employ a full time coppersmith. As such, the casing was made out of copper as a reference to his ongoing work and a nod to his craftsmanship. The small band at the top with the distillery crest was added not just for banding, but to continue with the iconography of the cigars themselves who typically have the paper ring at the top.
The match boxes have an exploded whisky cask depicted on the outside. It links with the matches themselves, which are dipped in whisky to soak up the aroma. Once burning, not only to those lighting their cigars have the usual wood aroma and taste present in the air, they also have feint whiffs of the whisky that it’s about to be paired with.
