These Custom Phone Booths Tell the Story of Jura’s New Range of Whisky

Jura is a Scottish distillery that specializes in single malt Scotch whisky, and that is coincidentally located on the small island of Jura. In it’s current form, Jura has been making high-end whisky for 55 years, but earlier this year they rolled out a brand new range of styles. They wanted to get the word out about their new line, and so they hired creative agency Punk to build three unique phone booths that tell Jura’s story.

Punk, in turn, hired Grant Gibson of creative agency Bright Signals to create the actual pay phone technology that would go into the booths. The idea is that patrons can enter the booths and use the phones to “dial” Jura employees who describe their experience with the whisky. For now, they’re at Edinburgh’s Fireside pub, but they’ll eventually travel the world. For that reason, the phones needed to work offline and still be able to play the employee recordings on-demand.

Gibson started by purchasing a regular UK-style pay phone, and then ripping out the single PCB. That was replaced with a Raspberry Pi which takes input from an Adafruit membrane keypad, and outputs through a Pimoroni Display-O-Tron Hat LCD and the speaker on the phone handset itself. Those parts were mounted on laser cut Pespex, and then the personalized phone booths were sent out into the world to spread the word about Jura whisky.