Pride in precision: how a brewer inspired a watchmaker

If you collect four vastly different Scottish artisanal brands, give them all a brief to use a beer – specifically the Original beer of their fellow compatriots, Innis & Gunn – as a starting block to create something unique in their own disciplines, you end up with something called Project Ampersand.

In this project, chocolate, menswear and radios are all reinterpreted with an Innis & Gunn slant by global brands such as Coco, Kestin Hare and Revo respectively, and the first collaboration in the project is with design studio Instrmnt.

The Glasgow-based, multidisciplinary industrial product design studio has produced a wide range of lifestyle goods and furniture since Pete Sunderland and Ross Baynham founded the company in 2014, but it is its minimalist watches that have gained them the most praise.

“We’ve admired the Instrmnt brand for a number of years, not just for the quality of their products but also due to their commitment to a pared-back and minimal aesthetic,” explains Dougal Sharp, founder and master brewer of Innis & Gunn. “Ross and Pete are very much at the vanguard of the creative scene in both Glasgow and Scotland.”

Instrmnt chose to reinterpret a wristwatch for the project. Named after the project itself, its components are made from three separate processes involved in the beer brewing. The Innis & Gunn brewery helped inspire the circular dial design and casing, which reflects the plan view of a keg. The cooperage helped with the strap – Sunderland and Baynham liked the way the strap would “patina” with age in a similar way to the barrels. And products from the chip smoker in south-west France (where the barrels are chipped and toasted before being put into the beer during the maturing process to impart flavour) were used in the packaging.

The final product is a sleek, simple yet elegant watch that’s become typical of Instrmnt.

“We were essentially given free rein in how we wished to interpret the brief, what kind of product we would produce, and in what capacity,” Baynham told me. “The fact that we could focus on making an initial run of only 13 watches allowed us to approach each aspect of the design on an entirely bespoke level.”

The watch is an incredibly well-made bit of kit, with everything accounted for in painstaking detail. It’s this level of precision in their work that both Instrmnt and Innis & Gunn take pride in.

“Part art, part science, part technology, part imagination, part creativity … brewing has it all,” Sharp says. “Instrmnt picked up quite quickly on the precision of the brewing part that was juxtaposed in a way with the very manual dismantling and toasting of the barrels.”

“By nature, precision is integral to watchmaking, but there were certain design and manufacturing elements of the Ampersand watch which took this further,” Baynham adds. “For example, our pad-printed dial is based specifically on the dials of the brewery mash tuns we observed on our visit there; namely their clear, functional marking system and colour scheme.

“The leather strap,” he continues, “is tanned using acorns in an intensive 12-month process before being hand-cut and finished. These small details contribute to a heightened level of precision and finish.”

With such a focus on design, surely the process was long and arduous? But it seems that the inspiration came flowing after visiting the three key sites in the brewing process – the cooperage and brewery in Scotland and the Arobois chip-smoking factory in Gagnac-sur-Cère in south-west France.

“We thought the physical processes and machinery that we use in our brewing methods would provide rich inspiration to a brand that embraces its industrial side, and that proved to be the case – as typified in the end wristwatch,” Sharp says.

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“This specific project developed in a really natural way – we decided early on that designing a watch made sense, with that being our key area of expertise, coupled with the importance of timeframes and precision in the brewing process,” Baynham explains. “The bourbon barrels being given a second life in flavouring Innis & Gunn’s Original beer is pretty interesting to us. Circularity and the passage of time became a theme in many of our design discussions.

“From thereon in, we went from sketching and ideation to physical samples of casings, dials and straps, in rough forms and 3D prints. We ultimately created a series of consumer-quality samples in two or three iterations before deciding on the final direction. While the overall design process had similarities to past projects, the Ampersand watch really took on a life of its own based on the locations we visited and the processes we observed at each.”

For more information on Project Ampersand, visit www.innisandgunn.com/ampersand