Afternoon! We’re just snuggling up to the weekend again,
and you know what that means: it’s time for this week’s post. I’m pushing the
boundaries of absurdity again this week, as I unveil a post that I’ve been working
on for ages. Finally it’s ready, or at least as ready as it’s ever going
to be, and it proves that I’ve been thinking far too much about why there are
so many branded beer glasses out there these days.
Thanks for stopping by. If you can be bothered to read
the post, that would be lovely, though I do hope you’ll take it in the spirit
with which it is intended, and that perhaps you’ll come back next week to see
what I’m going on about then. Leave me a message if you want, but most
importantly, have a great weekend and enjoy yer booze.
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| Chang |
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| Lees |
When you go out for a beer these days, you might be noticing
that with increasing frequency each beer is coming in its own ‘unique’ glass –
one I had in Belgium came in a wooden
tankard – now that was
special. Run and tell that, Fosters. I don’t have a picture because that
was well before I started this blog and before bottles and glasses became my
surrogate family, but if you imagine a tankard made out of wood, you’ll get
pretty close to what it looked like.
This trend for branded glasses has progressed to the point
where you sometimes receive an apology with your beer if you don’t get it in
the right one – as if it’s a status symbol, and you’re supposed to care. Let me
tell you now; I don’t.
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| pretty generic |
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| meh |
Don’t look at me like that. I’m not ordering the beer for
the glass it comes in. Maybe if the glass was interesting enough I might – like
the wooden tankard - but most of these glasses aren’t that distinct, and the
ones that are are way too feminine, so any self-respecting heterosexual male
would be reluctant to drink out of them. We’re not fighting a battle for metrosexuality
here. It’s only beer, and I don’t believe branded glasses have much (if
anything) to do with flavour; it’s really all about marketing and brand
visibility, though it has to pretend that it’s not.
“You drink with your
eyes first,” says Guinness Brewmaster, Feargal Murray in this article. No-o-o-o… you only drink with your eyes first if you’re an idiot, and
someone’s told you you’ll get drunk quicker if you pour vodka directly into
your eyeball.
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| San Miguel |
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| Becks Vier |
‘You drink with your eyes first’ is just a platitude, and
too often people hear a platitude and think that just because someone’s said
it, and it sounds clever, that it’s the truth. Another one that Guinness
espouses is, “good things come to those who wait”. What is it with Guinness?
Just to clarify on the first point, you look at the
pint with your eyes first. You might then make a subconscious assumption
as to how good it’s going to taste, but it’s only going to taste how it tastes,
and that assumption is only based on the fact that you already like beer.
So does Leffe need to be served in that ridiculous
(and feminine) pseudo-wine glass (pictured below)? The first time I received a Leffe in that, I
had to drink it quickly in order to go back and get a pint that came in something
more manly – instead of something that made it look like something more manly
might come in me…
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| feminine Leffe glass |
I’ve heard that the glass plays a part in making sure the [precious]
liquid makes contact with the correct part of your tongue for tasting it – but
that is assuming that different tastes (salty, sour, bitter, sweet and umami)
map to different areas of the tongue, and according to Wikipedia, fount of all
knowledge, they don’t; taste qualities are found on all areas of the
tongue with some regions being more sensitive than others. Isn’t that whole
idea a little patronising? Why can we not be trusted to shift the liquid to the
‘right’ parts of our tongues of our own volition?
If we need different shaped glasses to ensure we enjoy our
beer properly, how come cutlery isn’t even more complicated than it already is?
Why don’t we have a fork for making sure the chicken gets to the right part of
our tongue? Then another fork for the cabbage, one for the potatoes and a straw
for the gravy? Presumably someone realised the washing up would take five times
as long.
While I’m on the subject, has anyone invented a fork that
penne won’t fall off of? And what about the Chinese? They aren’t even bothered,
are they? Their cutlery isn’t even anywhere near as complicated as ours; it’s
just two sticks!
Nevertheless the different types of cutlery are devised for
practical reasons – to make it easier to consume items, not to make sure you
taste them properly.
Different shaped glasses can alter the experiencing of a drink to some extent, it can make the act
of drinking more or less comfortable, the act of holding a drink more or less
awkward, it can make your drink look more
or less attractive (subjectively), or you could argue it has a psychological
effect on how much you enjoy the drink, but for my money it tastes the same
when it’s in your mouth - which is the important thing. Isn’t it? Or are all
those things important? Psychology could potentially be quite important, but you
could say that about anything. The important factor in a steak is the quality
of the meat, and whether it’s cooked to your preference, not what plate it is
served on. You could serve it on a naked lady and stick a sparkler in it (the
steak, not the lady… unless you prefer it the other way around…), but would
that make it taste any better?
There is a restaurant where you dine in complete darkness – the point being that you don’t make any
preconceptions about what you are eating, or about the people you are dining
with. That sounds like it would be an experience, but it doesn’t make
the food at that restaurant any better than the food at any other restaurant.
It just means you’ve been stimulated intellectually while you were there, and
that you’ve enjoyed the food, free from preconceptions based on what it looks
like. Presumably presentation isn’t an important consideration in the kitchen
there.
It could all be brown slop, and you wouldn’t know (but what
would be wrong with that? Gravy is brown slop and that’s lovely. And
chocolate ice cream). If all restaurants served their food in complete darkness
though, it wouldn’t be special. Similarly, if every beer has its own glass, that
loses its appeal also, and you’re not even intellectually stimulating drinkers
by serving their drinks in fancy glasses.
A bit of internet research turned up quite a bit of division
and a good deal of unqualified opinion – it is the internet, after all, and
everything I write is unqualified opinion anyway – that’s what the internet’s
for; writing a bunch of crap, and then thinking that perhaps someone else in
the world gives a shit, or is even going to read this far. [Are you
still there?]
So I found some sites that said, “the glass makes no
difference to the flavour of beer”, and nothing more. Thanks for that. However,
here at Drink It How You Like It, I like to point you in the direction of
genuinely useful sites (and there are a surprising amount of useful booze
related ones), so you might like to pay a visit to this one. It has a lot to say about the benefits of using different
types of glasses, and what beers suit each type. It maintains that the shape of
the glass is far more than just marketing, and says that beer novices hold that view. I’d hardly call myself a beer novice, but I might seem like one
to a beer snob…
To be fair, the defence of variations in glassware smacks a
bit of unquestioning enthusiasm for all things beer-related. There’s nothing
wrong with enthusiasm, but you should be aware that not all things that are
associated with beer need to be celebrated.
Now, a large part of Beer Advocate’s argument is that it
makes the beer look nice. It does go on
though to argue that scientifically
the glass has an effect on head retention
and that this is important because the head holds a number of volatiles - which is desirable because
there’s all flavours and stuff in there. Nowhere does it imply that the glass
ensures the beer comes into contact with the correct part of your tongue for
tasting it – I’ve checked.
I’m prepared to accept that stuff about head retention and
volatiles, though. For a while I’d been working on an investigation into the
way a ‘perfect pint of Guinness’ is achieved by way of the two part pour. While
everyone else seems to positively celebrate the two-part pour, I don’t
like it because I get annoyed with having to stand at the bar for longer than
is strictly necessary to get a pint – the liquid itself tastes the same either
way. I’ll admit that a correctly poured pint of Guinness looks nice, but that’s
not what I’m thinking when I order it. I’m ordering it for the taste, and then
I’m disappointed that I forgot it took 119.53 seconds to pour it, and I wish
I’d ordered something else. All beer looks nice anyway.
The thing is, the more research I did into the two part
pour, the more I came to understand it. I still don’t like it, but the
two part pour is at least a little bit about getting the balance of flavours
right, as well as being about looking good. The head tastes different to the
body of the pint, so you don’t want too much of one and not enough of the
other. Therefore the two part pour helps facilitate the pouring of the pint in
the correct proportions. It just happens that in marketing, it is beneficial to
turn a negative into a positive.
What is the drawback with Guinness? It takes two minutes to
pour a good one. Don’t dwell on that, celebrate it - change ‘it takes two minutes to pour a good
one’ into something frighteningly
specific like ‘it takes 119.53 seconds to pour the perfect pint of
Guinness’ - because you can measure the time it takes to pour a pint in
hundredths of seconds (have you ever seen a bar tender measure the time he
spends pouring your pint? I haven’t. And I’m sure I’ve never had one that took exactly
119.53 seconds). Call it an art form, make it a selling point, celebrate
it.
In lager the head is just froth at the top (and for my
money, not pleasant to drink, though it is better to have some head than
a flat looking pint with none at all), but you can drink the head of a Guinness
like you can the rest of it.
The glass is also fairly important in pouring Guinness,
since the harp marks where the first pour should end, and the shape (it is
said) facilitates the ‘Guinness surge’, which is the rush of bubbles you see
running down the glass, though from my research I don’t recall the chemical
reaction that causes the surge being important in terms of flavour, it just looks
cool. In fact, I had a can of John Smiths Extra Smooth the other night, in a
pretty standard pint glass, and there were bubbles surging in that,
regardless.
Conceivably, if it does take 119.53 seconds to pour a
perfect pint of Guinness, why don’t they install a mechanism in the pumps that
does the first pour for a specific amount of time, and then does the second
pour for the exact right amount of time also, so that, in combination, it comes
to 119.53 seconds? Then you wouldn’t
need a harp on the glass, there would be less scope for human error, and you would
always be able to get a pint that was poured in the exact correct amount of
time. Why? Presumably because it’s not that important.
Yes, you could say I’m being ridiculous, but no more
ridiculous than the suggestion that a pint can be poured in 119.53 seconds.
Apart from your specialist Belgian beers, a lot of the beers
you get coming in their own glasses are lagers like Carling and Fosters. Stella
Artois comes in all kinds of glasses,
and in fact there have been more than one type of Stella Artois branded glass
(a selection is pictured here), so I don’t think you can tell me the glass has that
much of an effect on that particular beverage, because if it did, there
would only be one type of branded glass per drink – unless there are scientists
at Stella Artois who keep finding better and better shaped glasses. I don’t
think they put quite that much thought into it, do you?
If you’re that into beer that you want it in a specific
glass… you probably shouldn’t be drinking Stella. Or Fosters. The breweries
want you to think that they are trying to enhance your enjoyment of
their product, when all they’re really doing is coming up with marketing
gimmicks.
Yeah, I know, I’m being a bit cynical here. It a lot of
cases it’s probably just a case of someone getting excited and saying, “hey,
wouldn’t it be cool if our beer had its own glass?” It doesn’t mean we have to
get all precious about it, though.
One of the points Beer Advocate makes is that in some cases,
the glass is designed before the beer. Isn’t that getting things the
wrong way round? That’s not even putting the cart before the horse, it’s
putting the cart inside the apples. If the shape of the glass is so
important, you should be tailoring it to your beer, not designing a cool glass
and then trying to make a beer to go in it… Make the best beer, not the best
beer that goes in the glass you’ve designed.
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Is there a conclusion to be drawn from all of this? Well;
yes. If you accept that different types of glass suit different types of beer,
then you can conclude that there only needs to be as many types of glass as
there are types of beer (so you know, one type for stout, one for
premium lager, one for wheat beer, etc…). Anything else is marketing. A pub
need only keep the right kind of glasses, not a glass for every beer.
There’s a pub I’ve mentioned before, The New Oxford in
Salford, where they do actually give you the right glass for every beer they
serve. Now, I do appreciate the attention to detail that that requires. They
have a shit-ton of obscure Belgian beers and real ales, and they pluck the
right glass off the shelf with a degree of professional pride that is a
pleasure to behold. It’s the fact though, that all these individual glasses
have been produced that means they have to do it. It makes the experience more
authentically Belgian, and it wouldn’t be the same if they just served the
beers in generic beer glasses. No one would know though, if the individual
glasses didn’t exist, so… when you get right down to it, does it enhance the
experience of drinking beer, or does it needlessly complicate it?
I suppose this is where we are now, brought by decades of
free market capitalism. We’re stuck with it. To remove all the different
glasses would be to move towards a state of communist uniformism. We’d all be
driving identical grey cars, wearing identical grey suits, and have more or
less identical grey lives before you knew it. And we’d only need one type of
beer. Ok, so most of us do have identical grey lives, but at least our cars
come in different colours, suits in different fabrics, and there are tons of
types of beer. In a world where the economy is founded on perpetual growth, but
supported by finite resources, these are the kinds of things that are needed to
keep people in work and the wheels of society turning.
So shall we just keep all the different glasses? Yeah, go on
then.
