Our client Will Cookson from Pangolin got in touch with a deceptively simple but fantastic brief. Chivas would like the most complicated whisky pour…ever.
Cue a fantastic tip to the Strathisla Distillery, complete with a rummage in their warehouse and many whisky tastings.
N.B. Whisky tastings should be an important part of lots of projects….
Chivas Regal Whisky Pour Rube-Goldberg Machine
Once we had a brief, a pile of distillery parts and a sense of Distillery and its processes, we set to scratch building lots of mechanisms that we thought might be useful in a whisky pouring machine. I had had the idea of using a large ball bearing to activate the pour, so I needed ways to move it through a sequence of events that represent all the parts of the Distillery process.
So there is a grain auger, a mash tun, bits of a condensing coil, a few recycled barrel parts, a weighing scale and a distribution plate that represents the complexity of the blending process.
When the ball is released at the top of the mechanism, it takes just over a minute to travel around the machine and pour two glasses of Whisky….