Drinking Vessels are more than just functional utensils for holding a beer between its pour and its swallow. In fact, drinking vessels can make the beer, just as clothes are sometimes said to make the person. They are both practical and emotional, and their shape, size, and material are designed to match both the beer and the occasion, because everything has its time and place. Just as most people would never consider drinking a summer ale or crisp lager in a beer garden out of a cognac snifter, one would hope never to be served a digestif barley wine in a heavy, sturdy, glass mug with a handle. There are dozens of beer styles—from rich to lean, from hefty to delicate, from velvety to assertive, from honey-sweet to tart—each conveying a different culinary experience; and the aesthetics of the glass, its look and its feel, can accentuate, obfuscate, suppress, or exalt that experience.

Beer-drinking vessels can range from fine, thin, delicate, luxurious stemware to solid, robust, durable, earthenware mugs. Unfortunately, in all too many eating and drinking establishments nowadays,especially in North America, beer—any beer—is uniformly served in a standard, straight-side, wide-mouth shaker pint beaker, made of thick glass and filled without flair, to the brim, often without a head. A properly chosen drinking vessel, in contrast, can bring out a beer’s subtle and brilliant hues of color or its impenetrable opaqueness. It can display the enticing promise of a firm, white crown of foam, as well as the lace along the side in the afterglow of a sip well savored. Shape is important, too, because a drinking vessel’s grip is part of the prologue to the sensory joys ahead. There is something sensuous about holding a weissbier glass around its slender narrowing just above the base; there is something husky and affirming about the grasp of the handle of a liter mug of helles; there is something elegant about balancing a tulip glass of pilsner or a flute of biere de saison to one’s lips; and there is something faintly decadent about cradling a chalice of Trappist tripel while enjoying its bouquet. However, there is very little that is inspiring about an overfilled shaker pint glass.

Left: Salt-glazed stoneware tankard with relief freezes depicting the apostles, Creussen, Germany, 1665. Middle: Salt-glazed stoneware jug with applications of coats-of-arms and planets, Creussen, Germany, second half of the 17th century. Right: Salt-glazed stoneware tankard with applied coats-of-arms and letters, Creussen, Germany, 1621. courtesy of rastal gmbh & co. kg

In the central European beer cultures, especially in Belgium and Germany, matching a beer with its proper glass is considered de ri·gueur, and every establishment has several styles of beer glasses conveniently positioned right next to the dispensing taps. There is the flute, which has a slight, stylish bulge just above the stem and a narrowing at the top that traps both the beer’s head and the aroma. The flute tends to be favored for beers with a fine-pearly, péttilant carbonation, such as Belgian lambic or gueuze. The classic pilsner glass is essentially a straight-side tulip glass. It is great for most pale or amber lagers. In Germany, a stemmed pilsner glass is also known as a pokal. A tulip glass is a short-stem glass, usually about 250 ml (8.5 oz) or so, with a wide bowl that flares at the mouth. It is a perfect vessel for rich, complex, higher-alcohol beers. The large bowl allows for swirling, which helps release aromatics. The flare at the lip directs the beer to the center of the tongue. In Scotland, strong Scotch ales are sometimes served in a pint-size tulip glass know as a “thistle,” so-named after the Scottish national flower. A weissbier glass is intended for both pale and dark hazy weissbiers with large, sturdy crowns of foam. These glasses look almost like elegant, oversized, upside-down flutes without a stem. They are usually sized for half a liter (about 16 oz) of beer with plenty of head space to allow for the traditionally high carbonation and the large head it forms. Goblets are stocky, short-stemmed, almost snifter-like, bowl-shaped glasses that can be excellent for strong brews and are often sized accordingly. A chalice is essentially a large-size goblet, often showing off an evocatively ecclesiastical shape. Appropriately, Belgian Trappist and abbey ales are often served in chalices. Mugs are heavy and sturdy glasses with a handle. Most versions are of Bavarian origin and usually come in sizes of one-half to 1 l (16 to 33 oz). Made invariably of very thick glass, they are perfect for straw-blonde German beer- garden quaffs and can be confidently clinked together without fear of breaking them. Some types of glassware move along with the fashions of the day. The British “dimple” mug, a somewhat decorative handled mainstay that first appeared in the 1920s, seems to have faded with 70s bell-bottom trousers and are now rarely seen in pubs. There are cylindrical glasses, ranging in sizes from 0.2 to 0.4 l (6.7 oz to 13.5 oz), which are traditionally used to serve German ales, such as altbier and kölsch, whereby the kölsch glass, known in Cologne as a “stange,” meaning rod, tends to be slenderer than its Düsseldorf altbier counterpart. Finally, there is the traditional English ale pint glass. It comes is almost cylindrical and has a bulgy ring below the rim and above the drinker’s grip. Should pub conversation grow exciting or one’s energy flag, the classic British pint glass will do its best to stay in the hand.

Today, of course, the standard material of which beer vessels are made is glass, but that has not always been the case. Over the centuries beer has been drunk from earthenware, pewter, bronze, china, and even—among the Celtic and Germanic tribes of the Bronze Age—from the hollow horns of aurochsen, the ancestors of all modern cattle. The world’s first serious brewers, the Sumerians, drank their beers with straws out of communal crocks. See sumer. In 10th-century Saxon England, the conventional beer vessel was a wooden tankard made of small staves held together by hoops of wattle or hide, with a solid wood base, and often lined with pitch. In ale houses, these would be passed from drinker to drinker. Some had pegs inside, placed at intervals to indicate how much each person was allowed to drink at any one time. In Germany, people in medieval beer halls used communal drinking pitchers too, only theirs were made of earthenware. Individual stoneware mugs that were high-temperature kilned and glazed with salt for a smooth finish came into wide use there only in the early 19th century. See stein. In Finland, the traditional sahti was usually served in a two-handle wooden tankard, called a sahtihaarikka. See sahti. Leather, too, had been a common raw material for drinking cups from Neolithic times some 3,000 years ago until the Middle Ages. When wetted and shaped, these were known in medieval England as jacks. During the Tudor period, from the 1400s to the 1600s, fancy, highly decorated jacks would also be called bombards, because they resembled the barrel of the bombard cannon.

Gold, silver, pewter, and glass tankards, often in the shape of a chalice, however, tended to be the beer vessel of choice only for the high and mighty, because of their expensiveness. This only changed in the early 1800s, when new manufacturing techniques made glass much more affordable. Glass is essentially silica-based molten sand. The first evidence of hollow, manmade glass artifacts dates back to Mesopotamia, in the 16th century BC. There is similar evidence of glass manufacturing in Alexandria in Egypt during the 9th century BC. The oldest known description of glass-making is on a tablet from the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (669–626 bc). It says, “Take 60 parts of sand, 180 parts ash of ocean plants, 5 parts chalk, and you get glass.” True enough. By the 1st century bc, the Romans had figured out the technique of glass blowing. By the 1st century ad, glass items, even window panes, were manufactured throughout the entire Roman Empire. But only 4 centuries later, as the Roman Empire crumbled, the art of glass making became all but forgotten. Only in the 11th century did German artisans rediscover the Roman art of glass making and started to produce small bulls-eye-type disks as window glass. This set the stage for the revival of glass as a raw material for utensils, and near the end of the Middle Ages, Venice and Genoa had become the European glass-manufacturing centers. The Englishman George Ravenscroft (1618–81) patented a method of adding lead oxide to glass, and lead crystal was born. By the time the Industrial Revolution rolled around, glass was ready to be transformed for mass production. A German chemist, Otto Schott (1851–1935), laid the foundation for modern industrial glass manufacturing, and the American Michael Owens (1859–1923) invented an automatic bottle glass blowing machine shortly before 1900.

The advances in glass manufacturing in the 1800s were eerily fortuitous for the transformation of beer from a generic daily drink to a social beverage of class, distinction, and variety. The replacement of the stein—in almost universal use until the early 19th century in continental Europe—with the glass mug coincided with the gradual lightening of the color of beer. The latter came about because of technological improvements in malt kilning. The development of truly pale malts meant that beer could now be made deliberately golden, amber, brown, or even black. All over Europe, brewers started to make new, ever paler beer styles, from the märzenbier released in 1841, to the pilsner released in 1842, to the straw-blonde helles released in 1894.

Over the ages, beer-drinking vessels have ranged from humble pots to some of the most highly decorated and beautiful pieces of pottery, glass, and silver in the world. Old German beer steins in particular are highly collected, with the finest examples fetching many thousands of dollars at auction. In modern fine-dining establishments, top restaurateurs are defining new roles for glassware. Restaurants will often eschew clunky or obviously branded glassware in favor of other styles that suit both the beverage and the table. Sometimes these are essentially wine glasses, which are designed for the dinner table and do a fine job of presenting flavor and aroma. Top wine glassmaker Riedel makes fine crystal stemware for beer, both under its own name and through its Spiegelau division. These are sturdily made, but thrillingly thin and perhaps represent the latest evolution of vessels from which to enjoy the world’s favorite fermented beverage.