How to pair every beer with the best glass [Podcast]

Julie Pandl, Boelter’s Tabletop Specialist, and Lance Taylor, Field Sales Manager with Boelter’s Beverage Division, discuss craft beers and which glassware best enhances the beer-drinking experience. They also chat about the importance of branding your glassware, the process of nucleation and how the upcoming holidays are always a good time to sample seasonal brews.

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Excerpts

Julie Pandl: The concept today is right beer, right glass. We talk a lot about that here at Boelter, because it has a lot of positive impact on our customers. So Lance, what are you drinking there?

Lance Taylor: I'm drinking a Third Space Happy Place. A Midwest pale ale. Delicious, hoppy formula. It's going to go into what we cleverly call an IPA glass. The shape of it is going to be a little bit more thin at the bottom of the glass and it's going to go up into a tall, slender, tapered bowl. So a little bit longer in general compared to other bowls, and thinner at the bottom.

A lot of the times, you'll see at the bottom some ridges. People who are glassware geeks like myself might be familiar with the Spiegelau IPA glass. Dogfish Head Brewing is most famous for using this glass; however, many breweries use it for their IPA. The ridges at the bottom are there to aerate the beer.

The reason why it's a smaller bottom that's thinner, that rolls into that tapered bowl, is to aerate the beer, so you can really get that aroma of the hops. You can kind of breathe in the beer as you're consuming it. And that's why many brewers and people who like to drink beer like to put it in a glass, because then you can really heighten more than just the sense of flavor–you can really involve your nose and get it going.

Julie: Right, right. I know you work with specifically with breweries and distilleries and cideries. On my side of the business, I work with a lot of independent restaurants and restaurant chains. When we talk about glassware and putting the right beer in the right glass, it has a lot to do with everything you just said, the aroma, the flavor.

It's also about the look, serving the beer in something that looks cool, for lack of a better word. You see one customer down the bar drinking it and think, "Hey, why do I want one of those?" There's a lot of opportunity for increased sales when you're choosing the right glass for the beer.

Lance: You're absolutely right. I fell victim to this just the other day. I had a beer, and it was in a pint. I looked down the bar, and I saw somebody drinking something in a fancy stemmed glass. And I said, "Ooh, that looks mighty fine to me." So I licked my chops and I said, "Bartender, what is that, my friend? I'll take one of those."

It absolutely does make a difference and turn some heads. If you're going to have a nicer, fancier, more expensive beer, if you put it in a nice fancy glass, why not tack on an extra dollar? The showmanship of it all really adds to the experience and allows the consumer to feel like they are living life to the fullest. Like the tuxedo for a drink, really.

Julie: It's not just the way it looks. I'm a big fan of having the right shape for my beer because it just tastes so much better when it's in the right glass. We did a training seminar with Spiegelau. One of our featured beers in that seminar was [Bell's Oberon Ale]. I must say, I'm a little bit of a bottle girl. I've been drinking the wheat beer out of a bottle for a long time. When we put it in the wheat beer glass from Spiegelau, I could not believe the difference in flavor. I am definitely a convert. I like to put the right beer in the right glass.

Lance: There are very, very smart people who created the shapes of these glasses. It's by no mistake. 

A wheat glass, sometimes called a hefe glass or a weiss glass, are very similar to a Pilsner. They're all taller in shape and thinner overall, and many times they're wider at the mouth. This is to allow the beer's head to remain. It stays at the top near the nose for, again, that aromatic purpose. So people can smell the beer while they are drinking it.

It's taller as well. Pilsners are typically a little bit more carbonated and it allows you to see the bubbles. Wheat has such a fantastic color to it, so it's designed so that you can see the beer a little bit better. It also has that space for that fluffy head.

Julie: Right? You bring it, bring up a really good point. In the food world, we say you eat with your eyes first, when we're talking about tabletop and china and things like that. I think it's just as true with beer. I mean, it happened to you. And if you see something that just looks delicious, you want one of those.

So I'm enjoying a Shiner Bock as we're doing this podcast. What kind of glass are we going to pour the Shiner Bock into? It tastes pretty good out of the bottle.

Lance: I do have a couple of [catch-all glasses] here with us, the first one being your traditional pint glass. It's the cheapest glass on the market. We don't always promote it being stackable (in the biz, we call it nestable). We really don't encourage that, but reality is: behind the bar at restaurants, even tap rooms, there's limited space. As a result, the classic pint glass reigns supreme. It's durable, it's cheap and you can nest or stack them as needed. That would be a fine glass for your Shiner bock. It's a catch-all for many styles. However, it's not designed for beer. A lot of the time, you're not going to get that desired aromatic effect that you might get with beer glasses that are designed for specific beer.

I also have your traditional mug with us. This is more for your hole in the wall, little tap bars, which are fantastic. I always like to say that they’re little bit heavier. So you pull them up to your face, and you just slam them down. You know, that's what I love. Like Oktoberfest mugs. It just makes it that much easier to get the party started.

Julie: All the glasses we have in front of us are custom decorated. That's one thing we specialize in here at Boelter. Specialize in decorating. So Lance, talk a little bit about custom decorating, from a "how we do it" standpoint.

Lance: We're screen printers coming out of the glass capital of the country: Toledo, Ohio. When we're using screens to print glassware, we're able to do a full wrap, compared to some other decorating processes. This is much easier for us because it's still just one screen. That can definitely add value to a glass. People think it's more expensive if it's a full wrap, but in reality we can make a one-color full wrap glass very affordable and look very, very cool.

Boelter also has a wonderful graphics team that can even help different accounts with designing how they want the glass to be laid out. One thing to consider, though, is you don't want to put too much decoration on it necessarily. Sometimes that takes away from the beer. Depending on the restaurant, the brewery, the distillery, that could be appropriate to the branding.

We can match any color. And we now have a digital printing machine, which can allow us to essentially take a selfie, and we can put that on a glass. It allows for very quick turns, low minimum runs and very high quality four-color process printing. If you want to be really fancy, we can use metallic colors. To go back to the tuxedo analogy, that's perhaps the pleats on the pants.

Julie: You mentioned the importance of branding. That's something we talk about on the food service side as well. What do you have to add to that from a beverage standpoint?

Lance: Logoed drink wear across the board. It says that you're real about your passion. You're not just some geek off the street. It's saying that you're professional. You're proud of your product. It adds to the overall experience.

For breweries and distilleries out there: if you have a logoed glass that's going to a restaurant, it's assumed then that they will have your product behind the bar. It's a great way to keep a good relationship going with restaurants. At Boelter, we can customize glassware so that we can have a brewery logo on one side and a restaurant or bar on the opposite side. That's a great way to get some liquid in their draft lines or a case behind the bar.

Julie: The more imprints you get from a marketing standpoint, the more somebody sees your image, the more it’s in front of somebody, the more effective it is. Lots of times that glass ends up in somebody's house. Maybe you sell it, maybe it's a giveaway. They're looking at your name, your brand when they're at home watching the Packer game.

One more question about another kind of beer, Lance. I know it's only October here in Wisconsin, but we can already feel winter coming upon us, and the holidays right around the corner. Traditionally, winter beers are a little bit heavier. Something like a stout, maybe a chocolate or milk stout or one of those beers. What are we putting our stout in? 

Lance: This is one of those glass styles that have many different names as well. You've heard it as a tulip, a goblet, a snifter, a Belgian. It's a shorter stemmed glass that has a short bulbous bowl. They have a flared lip at the top, and that's to capture the head. A lot of the times, the stronger beers have a really nice head on them. You get that smell from it. It also allows you to promote swirling when you have a stem like that. A stem allows you not to transfer the heat from your hand to the beer. A stronger beer is one that you're going to be sipping on for a while. If it's stronger, you're typically not going to put that in a mug and just slam it down. A sour beer would also be great for this goblet style glass.

Julie: One more decorating question for you. I see in the bottom of one of our glasses, we've got some etching. Can you explain what that is and what it's for?

Lance: That is called nucleation. Boelter can customize, nucleate any kind of logo at the bottom of your glass. We really don't want to do it with stems based off of how stemmed glassware is formed. But for the most part, we can nucleate many glasses.

What that does is it captures the carbonation of beers and creates bubbles that go through the glass. I always encourage breweries to do this with a hefe, or Pilsner glasses, that are taller. It looks so cool when you see those bubbles pop. But it's a minimal cost. Once somebody is done drinking their beer and they actually noticed it at the bottom, they're always excited about it. Some people who are a little bit more aware of what nucleation is, they usually can tell. And if they don't notice it at all, then they just think that they're seeing bubbles floating through the glass, which is pretty cool.

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