Norlan - Chapter II
Norlan Ritual FORMS
designing the experience beyond the object
The following article catalogues some of the produced results of a 4 year exploration into ritual, advanced glass blowing techniques, and redirective practice.
These relational objects are drawn out of the intimate moments and ergonomics of the performative actions we see in the whisky rituals.
In result these new objects reconfigure how things are experienced, and redefine whisky culture.
Photography - Marinó Thorlacius & Dan Zoubek
DRAVE WATER CARAFE
The Drave Water Pipette & Carafe diptych balances advanced digital design, precision machined production, and avant-garde glassmaking, for the intimate whisky ritual.
Here we dive deep, hold our breath in the depths, reach out and grab onto something new and not before seen. It is a carafe, paired with a pipette, for the sole application of water droplets to the whisky in your glass.
It is a new type of object, this carafe; a left of center, unorthodox, ultra-futurist form. Watch as it rides the blurred lines, breaking format from organic to geometric, from gloss to matte, and from transparent to opaque. Digitally designed, it is methodically brought to life over the course of five hand crafted processes involving mouth blowing glass, diamond wheel cutting, sanding, polishing, and oiling.
The Drave Water Pipette balances advanced digital design and precision machined production for the intimate whisky ritual.
It takes its name from the Old Scottish word "to draw"—water into the pipette, an altered aroma into the nose, an extended spirit onto the tongue. This is an object for the whisky alchemist in you, transforming your spirit through the slow, ritualized addition of water to whisky. Drop. By. Drop.
The pipette pulls the eye into perspective acrobatics, a square profile that manages to compress its dimension around a vacuum bore.
The aluminum is first extruded and milled, then tumbled against porous rocks before being anodized and finally shock sprayed to create a uniquely textured matte surface.
The depressions on the ends are tailored to fit the fingertip, allowing you, the user, to arrest the central pull of gravity by vacuum, and draw water from your vessel.
Drave Presentation
Film and Edit - Move Studios Berlin
Music - Helgi Svavar Helgason
Whisky is a complicated spirit. It’s comprised of alcohol molecules, water molecules, and a myriad of flavor compounds, not all of which are fully understood. These elements arrange themselves in particular patterns and when water is added to your whisky, the strength of the alcohol changes, altering the pattern of the chemical compounds in your glass. Change the pattern and you change the flavor profile of your whisky.
What’s the reason for doing this? As seen with the Norlan Whisky Glass, the whisky tasting experience can be dramatically improved when the alcohol present in your spirit isn’t allowed to rule the show. When you add water to your whisky, a little bit at a time, you can open up flavors and aromas that may have been suppressed by the alcohol.
So. Take the pipette deftly between your fingers. Draw the water and add to your whisky. Nose. Taste. Experiment. Discover your ritual.
Raif Whisky Decanter
A colossal fractured tower. The sole interruption in an endless acrid flatland.
The Raif Whisky Nesting Decanters are the sculpted defiant outcome of advanced digital design, inventive production techniques and the intimate whisky ritual.
Rebelling against traditional squat bodies and ornamental stoppers, this sleek minimalist vessel sidesteps the light, pivots on its axis, and lands its epic weight on the earth. The lean, long, svelte form of the glass plays with the Norlan design DNA, elongating and pulling at its skin. The stopper is milled, a stealth night flying form with the radar signature of an atom.
A silent, sharp sentinel standing guard over your spirit, the decanter’s singular shape allows you, whisky aesthete, to build a nested triptych of your favorite whiskies: a rebellious sculpture for containment and expression.
Once again, we were warned not to make it. We had a vision and our Czech maker had a headache. It took six months to finalize the design, and another six months of trialing and refining the technique of cutting the mouth for the stopper. Mouth-blown glass and precision-machined metal make poor bedfellows, but marry them we would.
Digitally designed, the glass decanter is exhaustingly brought to life over the course of five hand crafted processes involving mouth blowing glass, diamond wheel cutting, sanding, polishing, and oiling.
The decanter’s entire surface, inside and out, is born in a single slow exhale: molten crystal mouth blown into a massive hinged-steel mold. Blown, the bulb is cut off and the base cold worked flat. The mouth is so complex it required specially procured wheels to accommodate the stopper. After coaxing the glass mouth into a more exacting shape, the decanter is sand blasted in a gradient flow from the top down and finally, the matte surface oiled to a soft finish.
On the other side of the globe, the aluminum stopper went through a similar battery of trials. Edges were digitally sculpted, radii were defined and redefined in fractions of millimeters, and shock sprayed finishes were repeatedly sampled to arrive at a uniquely textured matte surface.
And with that, we step into the future perfect, eloping with the beauty of the glass technique and the optimism of machine and form.
Nyht Whisky Decanter
The Nyht Whisky Decanter is a condensed form, for short measured amounts of your spirit—more than a dram, less than a bottle.
Inspired by the bedtime routine of carrying a carafe of water with inverted glass to the bedside, this decanter has been designed for the very specific and personal ritual of enjoying a few pours of whisky while engaged in a can’t-tear-yourself-away book, album, or film.
A ring is precision cut into the top of the decanter, allowing its partner, the Rauk Heavy Tumbler, to be inverted and docked. The two can then be carried one-handed, from the place you fill to the place you take seat. By mirroring the design language of the Heavy Tumbler, we have created a soulmate object set, for the times it is time to be alone.
Every element, each curve, edge, angle, and facet of the carafe was tightened and considered over two years of development.
In tandem with the RAUK, the NYHT was designed to be a compact, utilitarian grenade.
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There is no other decanter produced for this function, the solitude, the private moment. It was designed for motion, as language is time based, so is this decanter.
As words move forward in a temporal unfurling of information, so does this decanter with you from saturation to point of arrival, and discharge.
It was designed to be hand sized, for carrying, from one place to another, the crystal, the spirit, the vessel and the text.
“After a hard day of experiencing events sequentially, prey to the causality, decant and prepare to experience all events at once.
Reach out, and touch my variational principle… This is the extrinsic decanter, for the story of your life and others.”
For decanting measured amounts, to pour out and take with you.
The smaller decanter allows for pre pouring a decided amount, more than a glass, less than a bottle.
KIST CASE
The Kist is meticulously handcrafted and features a series of faceted edges and details which relate to those found on the Norlan Whisky Glass.
Inside, a dusty white, custom die-cut leather container serves to hold the glasses like a diamond holding sunlight. The flat, removable lid is held in place with blackened rare-earth magnets, safely concealing the inverted glasses in their respective silos.
Kist is a beautiful word. It is an old word, from a time before whisky. A time of mist, and voyages, and large things as yet unnamed. It came to Scandinavian Scotland by way of the Norse Vikings, who referred to the very northern point of Scotland as the Sutherland, the south lands of the Norse world. This is where our name Norlan comes from, the fields and waters where the Norse and the Scotts collided.
At that time Kist translated to a box or coffer, a keeper of precious things. Over the centuries, the meaning of kist has since evolved, like all things do from memory and spoken word, but its spirit lives on in our creation of a singular repository for the Norlan Glass.
The story of our Kist, your keeper of precious things, follows a similar narrative to the word itself—involving voyage over great distances of land and sea. Over two years ago, when the Kist was only a vision, our designer traveled from Iceland to meet the Scottish woodworkers Method Studio of Blackness near the Castle of Firth and Forth. A collision of culture and skills, with a particular blend of heritage craft and digital nuance, ensued, and the limited edition Kist for eight Norlan Glasses was born. We offered this edition during our Kickstarter campaign and briefly thereafter.
Following this release, our Kist evolved still further (as objects in the service of women and men sometimes do) with new designs to accommodate two and four glasses. With these designs, we embarked on a yearlong journey to develop and fabricate with a new partner, the smaller, though no less considered, production editions we offer here.
