How whiskey brands need to design for highballs, flavours, and non-traditional serves

The whiskey category has a design problem that is more urgent than most of its brands have recognised.

Whiskey has traditionally been designed for a specific moment: a neat pour or a dram, consumed slowly, in a context that rewarded patience and reverence. The visual language of the category reflects that moment. Heavy glass, serif typography, heritage cues, restrained colour palettes, often a dominant dark brown. This design system works beautifully for the Don Draper pour. It works poorly for everything else.

And everything else is now where the category's growth has to come from.

The serve revolution that whiskey needs to design for

The fastest growing whiskey occasions are not the traditional ones. They are highballs, flavoured expressions, RTDs, and lighter cocktail-led serves that shift whiskey from solitary contemplation to social, sessionable drinking.

Suntory's Toki has built a modern identity almost entirely around the highball serve. Dewar's has positioned the highball as an everyday cocktail in the US market. Jameson has extended into Ginger & Lime RTDs. Jack Daniel's Apple and Crown Royal Peach have opened flavoured entry points that make whiskey approachable without feeling gimmicky. Strutter has broken category codes with peanut butter and honey flavours and a tonal position that belongs in streetwear rather than in a leather-panelled bar.

These are not aberrations. They are the direction the category is moving. And each of them places design demands on whiskey brands that the traditional visual language is not built to meet.

What designing for the highball actually requires

A whiskey designed for sipping in a crystal tumbler and a whiskey designed for a tall glass with soda and citrus are not asking the same questions of the packaging.

The highball serve is consumed in different contexts. Bars, outdoor settings, social occasions, daytime drinking. The glass is lighter. The colour of the drink is paler. The ritual is less formal. The bottle needs to communicate quality and craft while also feeling like it belongs in these environments. That is a different design brief to the one that produced the traditional whiskey bottle.

Brands designing for the highball occasion need to reconsider colour hierarchy, label weight, typography, and the overall visual density of the packaging. The goal is not to abandon heritage cues. It is to give the brand permission to show up in contexts where the full weight of traditional whiskey signalling would feel out of place.

Toki has done this well. The bottle is clearly premium and clearly whiskey, but the design language is lighter, cleaner, and more contemporary than the category default. It works on a back bar. It works in a social feed. It works in the hand at an outdoor table. It does not demand the low-lit bar environment to feel appropriate.

What flavoured whiskey design needs to avoid

Flavoured whiskey has a reputation problem that comes partly from bad design.

The category has produced enough gimmicky executions, neon colour palettes, cluttered labels, cartoon imagery, that many whiskey consumers have written off flavoured whiskey as a lesser expression. That perception is not entirely deserved. Jack Daniel's Apple and Crown Royal Peach have shown that flavour extensions can be commercially successful at scale. Strutter has shown that an entirely new brand can build around flavour-forward positioning with genuine credibility.

What separates these from the gimmicky ones is the design discipline. The packaging has to signal that this is still serious whiskey, made with the same care as the core expression, even though the flavour profile is different. That means typography that respects the category, packaging materials that communicate quality, and a visual hierarchy that puts the whiskey first and the flavour second.

The brands that get this wrong lead with the flavour and let it overwhelm the whiskey equity. The ones that get it right treat the flavour as an extension of the brand world, not a replacement for it.

RTDs are a brand extension, not a compromise

Whiskey RTDs have the additional challenge of competing in the crowded and design-forward ready-to-drink category. A Jameson Ginger & Lime can has to sit on shelf next to hard seltzers, tequila-based cocktails, and a proliferation of flavour-led RTDs across every spirits category. It also has to carry the weight of the parent whiskey brand.

The design answer is a coherent brand system that works across formats. The RTD should feel like a natural extension of the core whiskey brand, not a compromise for a different audience. The typography, colour palette, and brand voice should carry through, with format-specific adaptations that suit the can, the occasion, and the competitive context.

This is a brand system problem, not a one-off packaging problem. Whiskey brands moving into RTDs need to think about their visual identity as something that flexes across formats without losing coherence. The alternative is an RTD that performs poorly because it feels disconnected from the parent brand, or a parent brand that gets diluted by an RTD that is off-brand.

Strutter and the new whiskey brand playbook

Our work on Strutter was built around exactly this set of questions. The brief was to create a whiskey brand that did not look or feel like traditional whiskey, but that still earned its place in the category on quality and craft.

The design language borrows from streetwear and contemporary youth culture rather than from whiskey heritage. The flavour-forward positioning (peanut butter and honey) sits at the heart of the brand rather than as an add-on. The visual identity works across formats and contexts that traditional whiskey does not reach.

Strutter was recognised at the Harpers Design Awards. More importantly, it showed that whiskey can be reinvented without being diluted, if the design thinking is coherent enough to hold the contradictions together.

What this means for whiskey brands in 2026

Gen Z is drinking more, not less. 70% of Gen Z now consume alcohol, up from 46% two years ago. Whiskey has missed some of the early growth because it has been slower to evolve than categories like tequila and RTDs. The opportunity is not closed, but the window is narrowing.

The whiskey brands that will capture younger consumers are the ones that design for where whiskey is actually being drunk now, and where it needs to be drunk to grow. That means building brand systems that support highballs, flavoured expressions, RTDs, and non-traditional serves without abandoning the craft and heritage that makes whiskey worth drinking in the first place.

Heritage and lightness are not opposites. They can coexist, if the design thinking is good enough to hold both.

Denomination's US Executive Creative Director Hamish Campbell wrote about whiskey's Gen Z opportunity in Fast Company, September 2025.