Journal

Some projects stop you in your tracks. This is one of them.

Smoke and Splendour

BenRiach has always occupied a distinctive corner of the Scotch whisky world – a distillery that balances tradition with genuine curiosity, producing whiskies of real complexity and character. When the brief arrived, it came with a question worth answering: what does craft look like when two very different disciplines meet?

A meeting of minds

At the heart of this project is a collaboration between two craftspeople working at the top of their respective fields. A master blender, whose understanding of flavour is built over decades of patience, instinct and expertise. And a generative artist, whose work lives at the intersection of code, motion and visual exploration.

The conversation between them became the product.

Translating flavour into vision

Whisky tasting notes are inherently visual — smoke, honey, dried fruit, leather, spice. The challenge was to take those sensory layers and translate them into a visual language that felt as considered and complex as the liquid itself. Not illustrative. Not literal. Something that evolves, shifts and rewards attention in the same way a great dram does.

Using generative art techniques, we built a visual world that responds to the character of the whisky – organic, unpredictable and alive. Textures that suggest peat smoke. Movements that echo the slow patience of cask maturation. Colour that captures the warmth of a heavily sherried malt.

Craft in motion

The result is a launch film that doesn’t just announce a whisky – it captures what makes it worth paying attention to. A film as layered as the liquid. As precise as the blending. And as alive as the conversation that created it.