I like geeking out on glassware. We used to fill RateBeer forum threads with detailed and honest-to-god-100%-interested discussions of shape, volume, glass thickness, the benefits and drawbacks of nucleation points, whether those varietal-specific wine glasses were 100% or only partly bullshit… Important matters such as these. Does beer really taste different if it lands on a different section of my tongue first? Is the concavity of that shape improving the aromatics? God I miss that free time. More recently, I designed a few of my own glasses for a project I was doing, including a multicolored pattern on a stemless wine glass. It ended up being my favorite glass for photos, because you could spin it to match your beer: greens and reds popped with stouts; IPAs amplified blues and pinks, and the whole thing kinda glowed.
Before the pandemic, I would’ve pegged my go-to glassware as the Riedel Veritas beer glass I’d picked up maybe five years back. Featherweight (like some older Duvel glasses, and less fragile, thankfully), super thin, beautiful details, just a pleasure to drink from… Now, we’re a little less fussy. We’ve usually got an IPA pouring on our house’s kegerator, and a handful of curvy, medium-size nonics have become the go-to: the English-style pub glasses that are one of the fixtures at local brewpubs. Our most recent are from Russian River’s Windsor spot.
