Top Shelf Muddlers

Working with marketing agency, the Hive Inc. in Toronto, we produced a limited series of custom cocktail muddlers for Jack Daniels. Made entirely out of used whiskey barrel wood, these were given to the top 20 bartenders in Canada as part of a marketing initiative.

We started by experimenting with different ways of using the wood. Our goal was to preserve the character of the worn outer surfaces of the barrels, and the flavour of the charred inner surfaces.

The final design used two slats of the barrel wood, laminated together. This was turned on the lathe, off-axis. By doing this, the outer surface of the barrel was preserved on the upper handle of the muddler, and the charred inner surface was preserved on the bottom of the muddler. The colour of the charred surface is also highlighted down the entire length of the piece.

The steel straps of the barrels were used to create serial number tags for each muddler. The number was etched directly into the oxidization on each tag.

The muddlers were then packaged in a custom silk-screened canvas bag  with a description of the campaign, and placed in a wooden pine box.