Are Decanter Bottles Making A Comeback?

The other day, Seth Thompson asked me if I thought the days of decanter bottles are coming back to stay. I told him yes and no. The answer is yes, if you mean that decanter bottles are coming back for special release whiskey. We have seen this start with Heaven Hill releasing the Old Fitzgerald in the decanter bottle from the 1950s. We have seen, at the Green River Tasting Room event that we were attending, that they are releasing a jug decanter to honor the 19th century jug released by Green River back in the day. Decanters are coming back in that manner.

The answer is no if you mean figural decanters to try to sell whiskey to collectors of figural decanters. To understand why these were so popular with distillers, we must first look at why they came about in the 1960s. Decanters for whiskey started in the late 1940s when Brown-Forman released a special decanter bottle for the Christmas holidays. It was quickly followed by many other distilleries for holiday bottlings. It was popular with the public and they sold more of these bottles during the holiday season.

As whiskey sales started to drop in the 1960s, and distilleries found that their sales were decreasing, they decided that if decanters sell well during the holiday season, maybe they would sell well all year round and started to bottle decanter bottles for their brand. The original holiday decanters were glass bottles, often designed by well-known artists, but the decanters in the 1960s were to be different. They were ceramic, often figures ranging from hillbillies (Cabin Still) to cars, frontier wagons (Jim Beam) and people such as Elvis Presley (Ezra Brooks). They were hard to fill because they did not work well on the automated bottling lines. The cork often broke when opened. There were collectors of these decanters and they did sell well enough as the sales of their normal bottles of whiskey continued to drop. However, the expense of designing the decanter and the extra labor it took to fill them, made the profit margin very small. By the 1980s, figural decanters were being phased out. Premium whiskey such as single barrel and small batch whiskey became the focus of the distilleries.

These problems with figural decanters are the reason I say no, decanters are not coming back. Yes, we are again facing a glut of whiskey and distilleries are looking for ways to sell their whiskey, but I don’t think that figural decanters are the answer. We will see more fancy glass bottle decanters. The distilleries will most likely take their excess whiskey and start adding age statements and finishing them in wine casks to get rid of the glut in their inventories. There will be some time where overproduction will be a problem, but it will not be the problem that they had in the bad old days of the 1960s and 70s.