Glassware Matters

Most fans of craft beer collect branded beer glassware like stray dogs. Shelves are filled with all shapes and styles of beer glasses, most with brewery logos etched on their sides. Such brewery paraphernalia has become the currency of the craft beer market, bought and traded as often as the beers made to fill them.

Of course, every brewer will want you to drink their beer out of their particular glass—that is simply basic business marketing. Many will also claim that their glassware possesses specific design elements that can enhance the drinking experience, and bring out the flavors of the beverage to their fullest. But how much of this is true and how much is just promotional hype? Is specialized glassware even needed at all?

To start, you should always consume your beer from a clean, room temperature glass. Your palate can only detect five different flavors, which means that the majority of your tasting is done through the aroma. (This is why food tastes bland when you have a cold.) Sucking a beer through the narrow neck of a bottle robs you of much of the flavor of that beverage.

Pouring a beer into a glass also stirs up the carbonation in the beer, releasing even more aromatic elements as the head is formed as well as slightly oxygenating the drink. Think of pouring beer from a bottle to a glass the same as decanting a bottle of wine. No one would swill a wine directly from the bottle, and neither should you treat fine beer with any less respect.

Proper glassware should also only be kept at room temperature, or at the most lightly refrigerated. Serving beer in frozen mugs does nothing but crank down the dial on flavors, as cold suppresses the taste the same way that warmth facilitates it. In addition, a glass with frozen sides will only freeze the water out of the beer, leaving thin ice chunks floating in a beer that dilutes as they melt.

However, contrary to the multitude of glassware designs foisted upon consumers today, only two types of glassware are truly necessary to enjoy the vast majority of beer styles available. First and foremost is the basic tumbler or shaker pint, the standard serving vessel for most pubs and restaurants today. It is heavy, sturdy, functional and durable, and easy to replace if broken.

Many variations on this basic design can be found, such as the tulip pint glass or the nonic. The basic design is a roughly cylindrical shape that widens slightly at the top; thick sides are a plus but any further filigree or design elements are irrelevant and contribute nothing to the drinking experience. This is your basic, everyday, serviceable glass for most beer styles.

But for your more aromatic beers, one additional glass is necessary. This type would be your basic tulip stemware, which could also be a snifter, a goblet, a thistle or even a wine glass. This glassware is far more delicate, with thinner sides and a more intricate intent, and should be cared for accordingly. Breakage is common, and some particular items are not so easily replaced.

This tulip stemware has two attributes the basic, ordinary pint glass does not. The material is thinner than most glasses, which will allow the warmth from your hand to gently warm the cold beverage included therein. Many aromatic beers, especially the high-gravity barleywines or imperial stouts, only reach their full flavor potentials at cellar temperatures—temperatures about 10° to 20° warmer than the common storage medium of the refrigerator.

But the most important attribute of the tulip stemware is the shape itself. Unlike the pint glass—which is wider at the top—good stemware should narrow slightly at the rim, creating an overall bulb-like shape to the glass. This allows the aromatic nose to be better contained within the glass and sampled with a deep breath prior to each sip.

Anything beyond these two styles of glassware is vanity. There is nothing wrong with collecting many interesting and varied beer glasses, as we all have shelves lined with such beautiful brewery swag. But there should never be more than two that do not collect dust—the pint glass and the stemware—because there is no proven functional benefit beyond these two designs.

Can You Take the Heat?

Possibly the most widely circulated and believed myth surrounding beer is with regard to temperature. Most people believe that beer must be kept refrigerated always, and that once allowed to warm to room temperature, it can never be cooled again. Room temperature would essentially spoil the beer, much the same way as any dairy product would spoil.

Except that beer is not a dairy product. Fluctuations in ambient temperature do not adversely affect beer any more than any other foodstuff. Beer is remarkably delicate and yet astonishingly durable at the same time, and the common room temperature is in no way harmful to either its flavors or storage life in the short term. Beer bought from the warm shelves is no different than what is retrieved from the cooler, and may be the exact same beer merely a few hours removed.

So how much heat is too much heat? Is beer something you can leave in the car on a hot summer afternoon? For how long? Can it be stored indefinitely at room temperature? And what is “room temperature,” anyway? What counts as “hot” in Minneapolis is certainly not the same as what is experienced along the Texas/Mexico border.

Beer belongs to a special subset of our food supply that are living things. More precisely, beer is several billion living things—we call them yeast. Like most living things, yeast have a temperature range in which they are happy and comfortable, and a range in which they fuss about, complain and eventually die. We forget that beer is less a beverage and more of a microenvironment, depending entirely on your perspective.

Basically, if you are comfortable, so is your beer. During fermentation, most yeast strains prefer temperatures between 55°F and 75°F (or 45°F and 55°F, if you happen to be lager yeast). These ranges qualify as “room temperature” for most anywhere, and any of us will generally be comfortable in these environments. Over 75°F and yeast begin to produce some quite nasty byproducts, lending off-flavors to the finished product. Much over 100°F and yeast start to die, so their comfort range is pretty close to that of any other organism. But all this is for brewing; what about the packaged beer on the shelf?

For most beers the commercial product is inert, the yeast having died off long ago due to lack of food, filtered out or killed through a variety of pasteurization processes. What is left in the bottle is a mix of sugars, proteins, alcohols, oils and trace other chemicals (plus water, naturally). None of these compounds is active, so the only thing left for them to do is to degrade over time.

This is where the temperature is a factor. Heat accelerates chemical reactions, making the natural breakdown processes of large molecules into small molecules happen more quickly than they would otherwise. What does this mean for beer? Simply this: it ages faster. A general rule of thumb for the brewing industry is that beer stored at 100°F for one week tastes as old as beer stored at 70°F for two months, or as old as beer stored at 40°F for one year.

Time is as much a factor in beer quality as is its ambient temperature. Storing beer in the trunk of your car during summer months is obviously a bad choice—unless it is just for that half-hour transporting it from the store. Fluctuations in temperature are not ideal but are certainly not disastrously harmful to the beer, no more than they are harmful to your own body. A good guideline is to never leave your beer anywhere that you would not leave your dog (and for the same reasons).

Beer stored at room temperature is never bad, merely not chilled... unless it has been at room temperature for many, many months. In this case, the fault is not with the environment but with the retail establishment itself. Do not blame the storage temperature for what is actually a neglectful vendor failing to sell their product in a timely fashion.