I’m not, when I’m in a pub, a great worrier about what shape of glass my beer is served in, unlike my father, who would only drink out of a thin-walled straight glass – he said he couldn’t stand the feel of the thick-glass “mug” against his lips. The straight-sided, or slightly sloping-sided pint beer glass has been around from the early 20th century at least. But the authentic English “four-ale bar” (public bar) pint mug up to the end of the First World War was actually a china pot in a bizarre shade of pink with a white strap handle – see George Orwell’s classic “Moon Under Water” essay from the Evening Standard in 1946, where Orwell, always the inverted snob, complains that this working-class mug was getting hard to find.
The usual sort of glassware in Edwardian pubs was a handle-less sloping-sided, thick-walled “straight” pint mug (pewter was restricted to the saloon bar). Around 1928 the 10-sided or “fluted” handled glass pint mug came in, and this is the pint glass seen in all the “Beer Is Best” advertising put out by the Brewers Society in the 1930s (it is also, in this drinker’s opinion, the finest glass to consume English ale from).
A 10-sided pint beer glass seen in an advert from the 1950s
The “dimple” pint arrived about 1948, and eventually drove out the “fluted” glass in the handled pint field (although 10-sided pint glasses were still being made as late as 1964): the arrival of the dimple coincided with the triumph of bitter over (dark) mild, and amber beers look better in dimpled glasses than in straight-sides ones: the light shining through a pint of bitter in a dimpled glass is the beery equivalent of the windows of Salisbury or Chartres.
Meanwhile in the early 1960s the major problem of “straight” glasses – their tendency to chip or nick where the rims rubbed together during washing and storage – was solved by the invention of the “Nonik” (no nick) glass, with its strengthened bulge about an inch or an inch and a half down from the rim, where the glasses could rub together without harm. Unfortunately, it might last longer, but the “Nonik” has to be the ugliest, least attractive container to drink beer from ever forced upon a sullen public – it does nothing at all for the aesthetic qualities of the liquid it contains.
The classic dimpled pint beer glass
A variation, the “waisted” thin-walled pint glass, which pulled the rim in slightly to avoid the possibility of “nicks” , has been take up most enthusiastically by stout brewers, and as a result since the 1970s it has become the classic Irish/Guinness pint glass. It is also used extensively in the North of England for serving Yorkshire-style “big head” pints.
Now the “Nonik” appears to be disappearing, replaced by tall, narrow, only slightly tapered thin-walled pint glasses. However, beerglass forms can be very conservative: the “tulip” half-pint lager glass, as lusted over by John Mills in the film “Ice Cold in Alex”, is now at least 60 years old.
11 Comments
July 12, 2007 at 11:46 am
You may be interested in this interview with a pub landlord from the 1890s which has an unusual explanation for the replacement of pots with glasses:
http://www.europeanbeerguide.net/london97.htm#cox
July 12, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Very interesting, Ron, as always – I noted the comment about the Pembury in 1897,
- not any more, alas, by the looks of the beerintheevening website entry for the pub …
September 7, 2007 at 9:02 am
Remember pint glasses are 20 oz and if it is 16 oz, it is not a legal pint glass. In USA, Americans discriminate saying 16 oz ia pint glass pint glass because it is all about money than serving the true original 20 oz as 20 oz is a world wide glass.
May 16, 2008 at 8:34 am
Hi. I am doing some research for a 1940s re-enactment group and need to know what sort of glasses would have been used in an English pub in 1940/41. This is the best article I have come across so far. Can anyone suggest where I can get the right glasses, or, (as I suspect) that is impossible, what is the nearest modern equivalent?
May 19, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Owen, you’d be safe, I’m sure, using dimple pint glasses, they were certainly in use by the end of George VI’s reign, or “straight” thin-glass sloping-side handleless glasses – not the “nonik” kind with the bulge near the top, these are definitely 1960s. The most authentic are the 12-sided glasses I describe, but these are now very hard to find, alas.
September 18, 2008 at 2:15 am
I have 6 of what I think are the 10 sided handled mugs mentioned here. On one side they have “PINT G R 64″ with crown between the G and R. I got them in England in the ’80’s. Does that match what you are describing? You mention 12 sided glasses in the last comment but 10 sided in the main description.
September 18, 2008 at 10:29 am
Yes, you’ve got six of the classic 10-sides beer mugs (whoops, the post above should have read “10-sided” too) – the GR 64 with crown on your glasses is the verification mark, put on by the local town council to show they had been verified as having the correct capacity, ie exactly a pint, and according to Hugh Rock’s Pub Beer Mugs and Glasses the number your mugs carry shows they were made by Henry Greener in Sunderland between 1910 and 1930 (the GR, of course, stands for ‘Georgius Rex’, representing King George V), so they’re something like 80 years old – look after them!
December 12, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Excellent article, Zythophile. I always wondered what a nonik (or nonic as I’ve seen it spelled) glass meant. I thought it might have a Latinate root, possibly relating to the measure of a vessel, or another exotic explanation (a la Plimsoll Line), and now I learn it is a practical, recent coinage for a glass whose rims will not chip in washing, most interesting!
When it comes to beer glasses I worry most about cleanliness. One cannot always take a clean odourless glass for granted, in my experience. Sometimes they give off a dirty soap kind of smell. I sometimes ask for a glass of water and use that to rinse out a glass that is suspect.
I like pewter mugs for bitter, it seems to do something positive to the light bubble in a good cask beer. In London, the Davy wine bar chain’s excellent Wallop is served in those mugs (or was on my last trip in 2005) and it always tastes great.
The one thing I don’t like is branded glasses. I guess I like looking at the beer “toute nue” and not through the prism of a name or logo. I’m all for brewers’ adverts but not on the glass.
If I had a favourite glass, it would a thin-walled sleeve sans bulge of any kind.
Gary
January 29, 2009 at 1:01 pm
In the US, the thick, ugly “shaker” glass is called a pint glass because, in the US liquid measuring system, 16 US ounces IS a “pint”. (US Revolution and all that- we don’t use the UK’s measurements). When the “Nonik” glass is used here in the US in some beer bars, it is correctly called an “Imperial Pint” but it is by no means common or has it had a very long exisitence in the US.
The problem with the “shaker pint” (besides it’s look) is that it was never designed for drinking or serving beer and its “16 oz” capacity is to the rim- thus, with any head at all, the drinker is not getting a full US pint of beer.
Compound that with the fact that glass manufacturers make almost identical glasses in 14 oz. and 12 oz. sizes, and that is the real crime in the US bars. (Except for the fact that there’s no standard beer glass in the US, and most local regulatory gov’t agencies don’t seem to be bothered by the short servings or mis-use of the “pint” term).
February 8, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Of course, you still hear the expression “a pint pot”, but most people assume it refers to a dimple glass (perhaps to distinguish it from a straight one), whereas it seems obvious that it actually dates from the time of the china pot.
Were there ever regional differences in the preferred glasses? I had always had the notion in the back of my mind that the straight glass was usual in Scotland and the North of England, and the dimple glass in the South. But I have no evidence whatsoever. Is there anything in it?
February 11, 2009 at 7:19 pm
Don’t know: I’m sure the evidence is out there in old photographs, brewers’ ads, elderly drinkers reminiscences and the like – anyone want to take on the task of finding out? (No …. I thought not …)