How Indian craft spirit makers used bottle design in 2025, to convey provenance and purpose

In a crowded bar where customers seldom have the chance to see the carton or hold the bottle close, it helps to convey something about the brand story in the design of the bottle. (Image credit: Clam Lo via Pexels)

Luxury brands have always leveraged storytelling, as a way to transmit their DNA, to talk about their innovations, to mythologize their creators and to partly justify their premium pricing. Mass-premium products, too, have deployed brand storytelling for at least 200 years. (American farm-equipment maker John Deere is credited for the first known use of brand storytelling to market his products in 1897.) So while brand storytelling is not new, how some home-grown spirit brands are using it now signals a shift in terms of what is considered premium and what kinds of messages brands are betting can resonate with younger consumers.

Take the case of Godawan's limited-edition Indian whisky Godawan 173. Godawan, which takes its name from the local word for the Great Indian Bustard, is made in the 50-degrees Celsius, dry weather of Alwar, Rajasthan. The number 173 indicates both the number of bottles released and the current population of the critically endangered birds that were once in the running to become the national bird of India. And the liquid itself is bottled in hand-painted Jaipur Blue Pottery bottles.

Godawan 173 price at launch: Rs 5 lakh for 700 ml.

Of course, older Indian brands have experimented with bottle design, too. An obvious example is Old Monk dark rum, from Mohan Meakin, which has produced some iconic and immensely collectible bottles over the years. But whereas those bottles (and brands) didn't read as obviously Indian, there is no mistaking the message in the Godawan 173 bottles.

Bottle design can help to tell the brand story; and (right) Old Monk has used some standout bottles over the years. (Images via Isabella Mendes / Pixels; and Instagram / Old Monk)

In 2025, Indian spirit brands have been refining their stories to highlight what's important to the makers, where the brands come from, how they are made and what they stand for. One way that some brands are doing this is by innovating their bottle design (even though this can mean greater cost and challenges in terms of sourcing, processing, stocking, transporting and recycling compared with conventional bottle designs).

Recent examples include Indore-headquartered alcobev company Great Galleon Ventures Ltd which is making its own 100 percent recycled-PET (rPET) bottles for its mass-premium vodka brand V21; made-in-Rajasthan Godawan whisky by Diageo; Bonga Bonga “mystery liqueur” — made by Delhi-based IndoBevs — which comes with an in-built infusion chamber; the bottle for The Expedition  — Amrut Distilleries' 75th anniversary limited-edition whisky — which reportedly took around one lakh Dirham (around Rs 23.5 lakh) to design; and Johnnie Walker's collaboration with feted fashion designer Rahul Mishra for the bottle label and mono-carton design of its limited-edition Blue Label — Johnnie Walker has previously collaborated with artist Shilo Shiv Suleman for limited-edition bottles that used ink made from air pollution to pay homage to Delhi.

Each of these bottles carries something of the intention and message of the alco-bev makers, and given the curious world we live in today, it’s marketed to buyers almost like the liquor within. Here’s a quick look at what the bottles say.

180 ml bottles made with (from left) virgin PET, recycled PET, and rPET with white colouring. (Image: Moneycontrol)

Chemistry problem

Polyethylene terephthalate or PET plastic is everywhere. With a mind-boggling variety of use cases from bottling water to making medical devices and car parts, it has become a household name for another reason: its potential to pollute, especially in single-use plastics. Starting April 1 this year, a government mandate requires that PET bottles contain at least 30 percent recycled PET or rPET. Now, this can pose a few challenges. First, where “virgin” PET is smooth and easy to work with, recycled PET pellets can be inconsistent in terms of smoothness and greyish in colour.

A product manager at Great Galleon Ventures in Dhar, Madhya Pradesh, explains the differences between (anticlockwise from left) mechanically processed PET and chemically processed PET pellets versus virgin PET. (Image: Moneycontrol)

In Madhya Pradesh’s Dhar district, Great Galleon Ventures — a family-owned business that makes extra neutral alcohol (ENA); a mass-premium vodka; an XXX rum; ready-to-drink low-alcohol spritzers under brand Rascal; and a strong beer called Yaary; and bottles whiskies for Suntory in India — has imported machines from Japan to overcome these problems. They’ve also experimented with colouring, to get white bottles similar to what you’d get with virgin or unused PET. Company representatives say it is currently using 100 percent bottles for its home-brand V21, a vodka that they say is thrice-distilled and filtered five times, lastly with silver.

A press release on the same said: “Each bottle of V21 in rPET saves 70 litres of water, 46.6 energy units, and 1.7 kg of CO₂ compared to virgin PET — enough impact to meet the daily water needs of 2.5 lakh people, power over 3.2 lakh homes, and offset emissions equal to 2.9 million trees working in one day.”

To be sure, the rPET bottles cost more to make — a company representative said it was roughly 30 percent more expensive to make than virgin PET bottles. The lead time for R&D and rollout was not insignificant either. And the price of the machines they imported — roughly a crore each — may be an entry barrier to other manufacturers adopting the same technology.

The upside, however, is that they get to make their own bottles in-house, be compliant with the government mandate to use rPET and appeal to a generation of eco-conscious buyers for whom things like carbon footprint matter more than buying a bottle that is gorgeous to look at and perhaps keep even after the spirit inside is gone.

Craft opportunity

Speaking of bottles that can be keepsakes, limited-edition Indian whiskies Godavan 173 and Amrut’s The Expedition were both designed to convey something more than the liquor inside.

When Diageo launched Godavan 173 in September 2025, it chose to do so in Jaipur Blue Pottery bottles. Aged over nine-plus years in three different types of casks — including in barrels that originally contained Rajasthan’s Asha liqueur — 173 bottles of the single malt were launched to mark the increase in the population of Great Indian Bustard birds from 100 in 2022 to 173 in 2025.

Godawan 173, with an ABV of 46 percent, is bottled in hand-painted Jaipur Blue Pottery bottles. (Image courtesy Diageo)

Most craft Indian spirit makers today take pride in the regions where their liquids are made and aged, often taking an interest in the development of the community around. Not only is it good optics, but also good business because it helps to preserve the local conditions — environmental, logistical — that the spirit-makers’ processes are fine-tuned for. Amrut Distilleries, for example, grows sugarcane for its Bella aged rum at its distillery on the Bangalore-Mysore highway, gets water from nearby and sources the jaggery from Mandya, some 40 km from the distillery. And Kumaon & I dry gin highlights its Himalayan origins and ingredients in most communication.

Godawan is made in the 50-odd degrees Celsius, dry conditions of Alwar in Rajasthan. Diageo’s design and name choices for Godawan 173 convey something about the context in which it is made: Godawan is made in Rajasthan which is also where Blue Pottery took root in India roughly 150 years ago— Jaipur Blue Pottery got a GI tag (geographical indication tag) in the late 2000s. And though the Great Indian Bustard is endemic to all of the Indian subcontinent, the largest numbers can be found in the Thar desert of Rajasthan.

Of course, Diageo is not alone to see and invest in bottle and package design as a way to build its brand. In February 2025, Amrut Distilleries launched 75 bottles of a limited edition whisky — The Expedition — to mark its diamond anniversary. Among the first to launch an Indian single malt internationally in the 2000s, the company was founded by current MD Rakshit Jagdale’s grandfather J.N. Radhakrishna Rao Jagdale as a blending and bottling unit in 1948.

Amrut's The Expedition was released to mark the 75th anniversary of the company, information that's echoed in its diamond-shaped bottle design; and the bottle for Bella has the brand name printed in Kannada as well - an acknowledgement of its roots in Karnataka. (Images courtesy Amrut Distilleries)

UAE-based Malayali designer Tonnit Thomas designed the bottle for ‘The Expedition’ — aged in Sherry and ex-Bourbon casks for a whopping 15 years, compared with around three years for most premium Indian whiskies, it has an alcohol-by-volume (ABV) of 62.8 percent (most Indian whiskies have an ABV between 40 and 55.5 percent). It is shaped like a diamond and reportedly cost 1 million Dirham to make from the concept stage to final iteration.

A concept note released ahead of its launch explained that the bottle took “six months of relentless innovation and five prototypes” to make. “Each box is handcrafted and painted, housing individually engraved and numbered bottles.... The bottle features a distinctive diamond-cut design, adorned with intricate gold engravings… (a) silver peg measure, handcrafted by a skilled Bangalore silversmith, accompanies each bottle. Ensuring authenticity, every bottle is embedded with an NFC tag and a bespoke authentication card,” it added.

Plain to see

The trend of using art in packaging for spirits is not new, of course. In the 1970s and ’80s, when he was already world famous, with his mental health deteriorating and reportedly his wife Gala encouraging him to take on any and every project that paid well, Salvador Dali designed bottles for Italian company Rosso Antico and the Spanish Conde De Osborne brandy. He also made the label art for the 1958 Chateau Mouton Rothschild wine.

Dom Pérignon has in the past commissioned artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons — who made a bottle top modelled on his famous balloon dog for the brand — to design cartons, bottles and accents. Absolut Vodka, of course, has worked with artists like Andy Warhol, Shepard Fairey, Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor, and closer to home, Indian art world power couple Subodh Gupta and Bharti Kher.

Amrut’s Bella sugarcane-rum bottle has a small but thoughtful detail, with ‘Bella’ engraved in Kannada to pay homage to the farmers who grow the key ingredient. Bella is Kannada for jaggery.

Ahead of Diwali, Johnnie Walker commissioned Rahul Mishra — easily one of the more successful fashion designers of this generation — to design a bottle label and carton. Mishra, who is known to favour Indian handcraftsmanship in his designs, took inspiration from “blooming flowers and spirited animals” of India to signal “bright beginnings” for the festive season. The result is a lapis-lazuli-blue label and carton with details like chattris with fairy lights strung across them, peacocks, rabbits, trees and flowers.

Fashion designer Rahul Mishra and actor Priyanka Chopra Jonas at an event celebrating the collaboration between Mishra and Johnnie Walker in London. (Images via Instagram and Johnnie Walker India)

DIY option

At a time when companies across consumer industries are pouring money into increasing user engagement, it’s not surprising to see brands devising ways to offer a greater sense of control to users / viewers. Some theatre plays are now staged with options where the audiences can decide the trajectory of the story via messaging. Memes and social media content are created to provoke reactions and carry on conversations. And participative events are sometimes designed to incorporate audiences at huge expense.

Delhi-headquartered IndoBevs tried to do something similar with its design for its Bonga Bonga “mystery liqueur” marketed to young and experimental drinkers. The bottle has two necks and finishing caps, to encourage users to infuse more botanicals they like (the bottle brings to mind the 2020 Ichendorf Milano Travasi bottle, with two spouts for a more controlled, drip-free pour, designed by Astrid Luglio, but the use case is completely different). Bonga Bonga already contains 40 botanicals — in some kind of white-spirit base that the company doesn’t explicitly name. The extra “infusion chamber” or spout is meant to enable DIYers who want to try adding more.

The two-spout design required a new mould to be made for the bottles, and R&D to make the bottles durable enough for transport and use. In an email interview, a representative explained that the bottle design grew out of a brief from the founder Sameer Mahendru to be “purposeful without needing explanation… Practical considerations shaped the brief as well. The bottle had to meet global safety standards, be manufacturable at scale, and withstand the demands of international distribution. We aimed for a design that felt bold and experimental but was backed by rigorous functionality… Longevity was another key factor. We designed the bottle not as a disposable vessel, but as something consumers would want to keep, display, and repurpose well beyond the last drop. This meant investing in quality materials, weight, finishing, and tactile details to give it a collectible feel.”

All of this costs money, of course.

“While the bespoke mould and infusion feature do increase production costs compared to a conventional bottle, this was a strategic investment. We view the bottle as a long-term asset that drives brand recall, consumer engagement, and cultural relevance. The return is not measured only in sales volume, but in the emotional and experiential connection it builds with consumers,” the IndoBevs representative said.

Bonga Bonga comes in a bottle with two necks; one of them is set to work as an infusion chamber for those who want to experiment by adding more botanicals in their drinks. (Images via IndoBevs)

Context-setting

Products sold at a premium have always sought to set themselves apart — to convey their worth through everything from the packaging to their messaging. Some, over the years, have also delivered iconic bottle designs. (At the highest-end of the spectrum, think designs like Guerlain’s Eau de Cologne Impériale handpainted bee-design bottle that was originally made for an empress. In the spirits category, Woodford Reserve Baccarat Edition with its crystal cap and 24 K gold etching stands out as much as the modern aesthetic of, says, a Japanese Hibiki).

Indian spirit makers like Old Monk have also delivered iconic designs in the past that convey its inspiration: Mohan Meakin's promoter Ved Rattan Mohan was inspired by European Benedictine monks and wanted to acknowledge their historical role in making premium alcohol. Old Monk was launched in 1954, and has since found a cult following and collectors of its bottles. The newer set of Indian spirits makers in the 21st century — even the ones in the mass-premium category — seem to be leaning even more into their context, using design to tell their story. In a market that’s increasingly becoming more crowded, the brands with most clarity - and visibility - around who they are and what they stand for will likely have the best shot.