Beer glass preferences, what's yours?

[UncleEbenezer]

It's a tactile thing; I just feel that a beer glass should not be held like a teacup. It should be clutched around its body with a manly grip.

Beer and tea. The two drinks best drunk by the pint, in a big chunky vessel with a big chunky handle.

Other drinks are best consumed in smaller measures (or in the case of plain water, according to immediate need). But tea and beer are the great Pints of daytime and evening respectively.

[Slarti]

I don't mind drinking beer out of a bottle - in fact when it was de rigueur to stick a slice of lime in the neck of Mexican beers there was no choice - but given the choice I'd still prefer it in a glass.

But as I mentioned in an earlier post I don't like canned beer at the best of times, and drinking it out of the can makes it even worse as I find the taste and sensation of the metal on my mouth destroys any residual flavour the beer might have had.

I can not stand drinking out of a bottle as it shows that the beer has had the life filtered out of it.

A decent bottled beer should need one smooth pour so as to leave the lees behind.


I've never been given a canned beer that was worth the effort to drink it.

Slarti

[AleisterCrowley]

Re: North /South split: I'm a Midlander - and apparently 'eccentric'

[Hallucigenia]

Heh, this is one area where beer drinking is way behind wine drinking, where there's been a lot of study of the effects of glass. Instead beer drinkers rely on tradition rather than what's best.

The lips are stuffed full of nerve endings so are very sensitive to glass thickness, things taste better from thin-walled glasses. Also there's a lower volume of (room-temperature) glass to warm up your beer. Set against that, they break much more easily unless they're titanium ones.

Tulip shapes concentrate aroma, which is generally A Good Thing.

In beer you're generally less worried about getting oxygen into the liquid, and carbonation gives an argument for taller, thinner glasses qv champagne flutes. But that's generally not ideal for flavour, and the top champagne producers are moving away from flutes towards more "normal" wine glasses.

I guess the above logic means we should be using proper wine glasses for beer at home at least - I have plenty of red wine glasses that are 45-50cl so big enough for 330ml bottles at least to fit with some aroma space on top of them.

Still doesn''t quite feel right, but I have been using Belgian-style stemmed beer glasses more and more, even if I don't buy into the full panoply of Belgian branding.

I guess I've a marginal preference for nonics but it's not something I get too worked up about in a pub, I know some people who have to specify which version of a particular brewery's glass they get!!! Dimples have an attraction for old-style beers.

As far as lined glasses go, it's partly the pub not having much choice if it wants to use brewery-branded ones, and partly lined ones are more expensive (more glass, less demand) so it depends how much they care about that sort of thing.

[Slarti]

The lips are stuffed full of nerve endings so are very sensitive to glass thickness, things taste better from thin-walled glasses. Also there's a lower volume of (room-temperature) glass to warm up your beer.

Why would you worry about your beer being warmed? All the best beers are gravity served from the barrels on the racks behind the bar and so are at room temperature anyway, aren't they?

Slarti

[redsturgeon]

Why would you worry about your beer being warmed? All the best beers are gravity served from the barrels on the racks behind the bar and so are at room temperature anyway, aren't they?

Slarti

Cellar temperature, 11c-14c.

John

[didds]

I prefer festivals that offer a half-pinter as I don't have to remember to say "only a half"!

Meatyfool..

there are festivals that offer pint glasses?

blimey!

personal prefenec- straight slided sleeves for pints, tulip shaped tasting glasses for halves and bottled/canned

didds

[simoan]

Why would you worry about your beer being warmed?

Slarti

I agree. Nothing to do with the glass. If you beer is getting warm, it's natures way of telling you you're not drinking fast enough!

All the best, Si

[jfgw]

Why would you worry about your beer being warmed? All the best beers are gravity served from the barrels on the racks behind the bar and so are at room temperature anyway, aren't they?
Slarti

The best beers are gravity dispensed at about 13 degrees C from cooled casks.

If the casks are directly behind the bar and within the bar area, they have coils placed on them under their jackets. The coils have cold water pumped through them from a cooler. The cooler is a black steel box containing a refrigeration system and a pump for the cooling water.

Some pubs have a cellar behind the bar and the beer is served by gravity from within the cellar. The Compasses at Littley Green is a good example: There is no bar furniture at all; No pumps and no taps. It's all served from the half-cellar behind the bar.

Maldon's Mighty Oak Tap Room has a false wall with big holes in it. The casks are in the (chilled) cellar behind the wall and the fronts of the casks poke through the holes to allow the beers to be gravity dispensed from behind the bar.

Julian F. G. W.

[didds]

I always thought that Northerners preferred straight glasses and Southerners preferred dimpled glasses with handles. The above two comments support that view.
.

Well I'm a man of Kent, brought up on Shepherd Neame, now living in Wiltshire and avoiding Wadworth, and I hate dimpled handles. straight for me please when drinking pints (though Ive been edumacated into a tasting glass for halfs maybe)

didds

[Clitheroekid]

I always thought that Northerners preferred straight glasses and Southerners preferred dimpled glasses with handles.

I've not worked out how to do a poll, but if anyone else is more clued up my options would be:

1 I'm a Northerner and prefer straight glasses
2.I'm a Northerner and prefer dimpled glasses
3 I'm a Southerner and prefer straight glasses
4 I'm a Southerner and prefer dimpled glasses
5 I don't mind either way

My apologies to all those who consider themselves neither Northerners nor Southerners, but polls do have their limitations!

[redsturgeon]

Where would we draw the North/South divide?

Eg. Is Birmingham north or south?

John

[AleisterCrowley]

Well obviously the Midlands - but for the purposes of this poll I'd say North (as the South starts at Banbury on the Oxford <>Brum railway line)

[redsturgeon]

I guess there is some relevance to the line from Bristol to the Wash (which probably goes through Banbury-ish to denote a demographic rather than geographic North/South. But best to self select to cover things like moving from Manchester to London and vice versa.

John

[JMN2]

Where would we draw the North/South divide?

Eg. Is Birmingham north or south?

John

Jonathan Meades drew the line north of Birmingham as on the map it's below the irony curtain, above the irony curtain people say what they mean and mean what they say.

[AleisterCrowley]

When people refer to 'the South' they often mean the home counties. I'd argue that the residents of Somerset/Devon etc probably have more in common with us Marches types from Shrops/Herefordshire than Surrey stockbrokers and Essex wide-boys
That being said, the Cotswolds are probably 'honorary Home Counties'...

[Phileasrob]

A few of years ago, I went to a pub with a couple of friends and I ordered a round from a young, busty barmaid wearing a rather low-cut top. When she started to pour into a straight, my friend, who is not a fan of the straight glass, turned round and innocently asked if she had any jugs. He went absolutely scarlet and half the pub needed hospital treatment for injuries caused by laughing...................

[Hallucigenia]

"All the best beers are gravity served from the barrels on the racks behind the bar and so are at room temperature anyway, aren't they?"

As above - even when they give the impression of being at room temperature, they will be cooled in some fashion. You only have to go to the less professional kind of beer festival in summer to see how warm temperatures can destroy beer.

Also British cellar temperature is only for British cask ales - European cellar temperatures are typically a bit lower, and it's normal for eg Belgian bottled beers to specify the recommended drinking temperature on the label, typically 6C for wheat beers but going up to 12-14C for abbey darks.

"there are festivals that offer pint glasses?"

Pretty normal at CAMRA festivals where there's a lot of session beers, less so at more "crafty" events where you'll only have a third. The bigger events are learning to offer a choice of glasses, but it's added expense that smaller festivals aren't prepared to go to when you can just put lines on a pint glass.

"Well obviously the Midlands - but for the purposes of this poll I'd say North (as the South starts at Banbury on the Oxford <>Brum railway line)"

See most real Northerners would say that the Midlands are not the North, so the boundary is between the Severn and Mersey catchment areas.

But we're talking beer culture so I'd suggest the relevant distinction is whether you have a head or not. It makes sense to have a tall, narrow glass if you're dispensing through a sparkler, whereas the larger surface area of a dimple glass is less important on a beer without a head.

[UncleEbenezer]

When people refer to 'the South' they often mean the home counties. I'd argue that the residents of Somerset/Devon etc probably have more in common with us Marches types from Shrops/Herefordshire than Surrey stockbrokers and Essex wide-boys
That being said, the Cotswolds are probably 'honorary Home Counties'...

That line from the wash to Bristol continues after Bristol, broadly following the M5 to Exeter, where things like developed-world infrastructure and investment run out. Those of us in West Devon and Cornwall may be the most southerly of anyone on the island, yet have more in common with the North of England (not to mention the celtic fringe across the water to our north) than with the areas described as southern England.

I identified myself as a "neither" in the poll.

[AleisterCrowley]

All the beer festivals I have been to (mostly the larger/CAMRA ones) issue a (refundable) pint glass, usually with the festival logo on.
Most are marked at the 1/3pt, 1/2pt, 1pt levels.
Warm beer is dreadful ! The decent festivals have a cooling jacket system, as do pubs without a cool(ed) cellar space.