“Glass”-ware in the time of the original Porter

Hello kiddos!

By now, I’m sure you’ve gleaned my interest in the old world (the rest of the links are real, I swear). Well, the old and highly technical worlds, but I don’t live in a dimension wherein the majority of the populace has read Principles of Brewing Science and Liquid Intelligence, so for the purposes of this blog, my interest lies solely in the former (and for the record, I have yet to take an Organic Chemistry class, so my high horse is more like a Shetland Pony, which is Scottish - it all ties together).

This week, I thought it’d be fun to blow your socks off by discussing a topic with which even wee lads and lasses are familiar - the cups and vessels which we humans put liquids into. As pertains to beer, for example, MacLeod has something like seven distinct glass vessels for beer, ranging in size from about 10 oz to 20, and with shapes ranging from cylinders to spheroids to whatever the hell this shape is.

But was it always so? Glass has been around for a minute, but I’m pretty sure I remember seeing a horn used as a drinking vessel in the two episodes of Game of Thrones I’ve seen, so when did that change happen? What were the intermediate choices?

To answer that, we’ll pick a particular time frame, roughly the middle of the 18th century (since the early part of this and the 19th centuries introduce little, but not insignificant, changes), and see what the nerds have to say.

The Options

There may be more options than these, but the options included:

• Glass

  • Somewhat surprisingly, unless you’ve seen dramas set in the Goergian era I suppose, there was actually clear glass in the 18th century! You can thank George Ravenscroft for that

  • Having said that, as we’ll discuss below, its massive price and a shortage in the American Colonies at that time meant its use was probably not too universal. I’d imagine it being used mainly for imported wine, by wealthy people.

  • A very interesting corollary is this: why was the bottle of rum in Pirates of the Caribbean so murky? Though the above article points to the possibility of crizzling, this image, and some footage I’ve seen of some incredible French wine cellars, leads me to believe it was just a layer of something or other

  • Wanna buy one? Grab two, send me one

• Pewter

  • Good ol’ pewter - the workhorse alloy from which a large number of drinking vessels was made. I have no idea how many - I only get a week to write these, so if you’d like me to go HAM on these puppies, Babish-style, we’ll need to talk Patreon and the abandonment of my dreams. But “most” beer was consumed in these apparently.

  • Wanna buy one? You totally can, chief

• Earthenware

  • Again, not much documentation on usage, but I can only imagine these cheap, serviceable vessels were popular - follow the link above for a few examples

• Horn

  • Ol’ eagle eyes over here spotted the horn cup in that link! Good on you, and indeed, maybe not for beer, but if Townsends sells it, you know it’s period-accurate

• Leather

  • This one you may have to buy yourself, but see the quote below for second-hand “evidence” of its use (i.e. buy the book I’m quoting and check its bibliography)

Why the shift? And why did it take so long?

A fair question, and the oft-quoted answer is along the lines of as follows, from Beer in America; The Early Years - 1587-1840 by Gregg Smith (hey Gregg, it’s 2020, you can drop the second “g”)

“[In the mid-19th century,] lager beer...arrived, and things were never going to be the same again. A light, crisp beer was ideally suited to the climate of America, and it was a hit from its introduction. At the same time, innovations in glassmaking produced inexpensive glasses that enhanced the presentation of the new, bright, sparkling clear beer, displacing the old pewter, wood, clay, or leather tankards that shielded crude and unattractive ales.”

Ouch, pretty harsh - King’s Taxes is beautiful, step off buddy. But yeah, argument number one is that the Germans, with the perfection of beers like what may be the best beer ever made, Spaten’s Münchner Hell (i.e. Munich Light), forced the entire beer world’s hands and ushered in an age of glass by basically brewing the Mona Lisa and daring us to look at it through cheap prescription glasses we bought off Craigslist. And if you’re curious, that beer’s like not even 38,000th best in the world according to the Will of the People (once you skim that article, buy and read Hobbes’ Leviathan in its entirety)

Also whoops, yeah, wood too I guess. Probably a skull or two if we’re being honest.

But, there’s a second argument, more for the delay in its adoption than for or against its inevitability, and that’s price. 

First and foremost, in the Colonies in particular, there was a shortage of bottles. Quoting from the same book, by Gregg:

“By January 1814 Jefferson was nearly awash in beer. He was confronted with a problem that has always confounded homebrewers: not enough bottles. In Jefferson’s time a severe shortage of glass made bottles scarce.”

Sick diction, Gregg, I legit love that word. Awash. Brigands ungentled. Quoth. Albatross. Harangue. Plinth. Tumult. Autumn.

Further, there’s anecdotal proof of a general practice of filling bottles from barrels of, say, brandy or rum, instead of buying bottles pre-filled. I can’t for the life of me remember where I read that, but this article discusses a number of almost-on-the-dot such practices.

The point being: glass was expensive, and it took technological advantages to push the price down, ironically much like malting technology, the advancement of which allowed for that beautiful pale beer (and the precise control of protein in malt that careful malting allowed probably didn’t hurt - ha, you thought you’d go an entire article without hearing about brewing science, didn’t you? DIDN’T YOU? Your wincing pleases me.)

Conclusion

It sounds kind of cool to drink Porters out of earthenware, but between the smaller number of nucleation sites afforded by glass, its clarity, its light weight, its affordability, its ease vis a vis cleaning, or any number of other cool things, glass is obviously here to stay, and arguably the best vessel material.

Thanks for reading, and Cheers,

Adrian