The Pinto of Beer Glasses

A commenter who rides a plastic rice rocket is taking me to task for recommending lager glasses for beer. This is like Richard Simmons giving tips on how to throw a spiral.

He says steins are the way to go. I see somebody went to Oktoberfest on his senior trip!

Hate to break it to you, kiddies, but steins are for tourists and people who want to get kneewalking drunk in a hurry. No knowledgeable person who wants to really enjoy a beer uses a stein.

Steins are bulky, so their mass warms the beer. Unless you freeze them first. Freezing beer glasses is the mark of a person who will never get past Bud. A beer glass should be completely clear, so you can see the product. It shouldn't be covered with a layer of frost which immediately turns into drippy condensation.

Steins also have wide mouths and straight sides, so they do nothing to focus the scent of the beer. Which is fine, if you drink the kind of piss habitual stein users drink. In fact, it's probably an advantage, much like that frost that helps your Bud stay so cold you can't taste it, and which obscures the loogie-like, filmy layer of chemical head.

The only thing a stein is good for is chugging a vast amount of beer as quickly as possible. That kind of activity has its place, but once you graduate from high school, it becomes less and less appealing.

There are all sorts of specialized beer glasses, but if you don't want to be a beer nerd and fill your house with ugly glassware, you can do very well just by buying lager or pilsner glasses. These are tall, thin glasses that generally curve inward toward the top. They look nice, they're easy to hold onto, they concentrate the aroma of the beer, and the big ones have lots of room for foam. They actually resemble Champagne flutes, as far as the shape of the cavity goes. That's understandable, because Champagne is a kind of beer.

I like blown glasses, because they have nice thin rims and they don't have lumpy sides that produce weird visual effects.

A lager glass will be fine for most beers. If you get into really heavy beers, you'll want something smaller. But how many people drink barleywine?

Anyway, a stein is like a Bose stereo. It sets you apart as a sucker. So there.