69 replies
1d6h
In the UK, and I suspect elsewhere, pub glasses are manufactured to indicate their age as they're meant to be replaced regularly. Often in pubs you can see they've far outlived their proper life, if you know what to look for, and are covered in etches from repeated washes. Clearly glasses last a long time, I don't think smashing is the kind of issue they're making it out to be.
These hardened glasses are sharper when they smash. They tend to smash after a few drops, but more drops than normal glasses.
They solve a historical problem from East Germany: lack of resources to make glass, which is no longer a problem. Normal glasses are recyclable. EDIT: No apparently they are not, so maybe that's useful?
>pub glasses are manufactured to indicate their age
Why? This just sounds like planned obsolescence.
>as they're meant to be replaced regularly
Why? Is it a real hygrine problem or something?
It's a quality issue. Beer served in a new, spotlessly clean glass will have a distinct foamy head on top of clear liquid. If the glass is dirty or scuffed, bubbles will rapidly form on the sides of the glass, which seriously affects the quality of the beer. The head will be thin and uneven, the liquid will look murky and the beer will taste flat.
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2971/0116/files/dirty_beer...
This isn't meant to be a nationalistic point, but America has a relatively undeveloped beer culture; beer is often kept and served very poorly and drinkers rarely notice. British, Belgian or German drinkers will notice, complain and tell all their friends if you aren't serving beer properly.
German here: as if! No one except a few nerds would notice in real life.
Those nerds tend to be quite vocal about it, though!
(I count myself amongst them, despite only being 3/32 German...)
What is this even supposed to mean?
Nothing more complex than three great-great-grandparents being German. (Oh, and it was meant as a joke - I definitely don't think of myself as part German!)
>Those nerds tend to be quite vocal about it, though!
Where are they loud? I never hear people in the pub/bar shout "My glass has micro-scratches, this is undrinkable!".
And that’s why I love HN!
>British, Belgian or German drinkers will notice, complain and tell all their friends if you aren't serving beer properly.
Yeah, no, that's an American PoV/meme to think all those nationalities somehow are fickle about the glass of the beer when in reality most of them wouldn't even notice in real life. Beer drinking is a causal activity there, not a sommelier activity where every detail is scrutinized.
You go to the park and it's full of Germans drinking beer out damn aluminum cans. Most bars are so dark and loud and people so drunk, the last thing they care about is if their beer glass is pitch perfect.
People do care about the quality of the beer, but the quality of the glass, not so much.
There are bad pubs and indifferent drinkers anywhere, but there's also a very large and long-standing market for quality beer and vast numbers of publicans who serve great beer without any fanfare. The Campaign for Real Ale has 150,000 dues-paying members. Sitting in an 18th century pub and drinking beer that was brewed within walking distance is a largely unremarkable experience in the UK.
It isn't a matter of being a connoisseur's fetish, but about the basic standards expected by a large bulk of drinkers. "Craft beer" is a fairly novel and niche product in the US, but even Wetherspoons - a huge chain known for selling very cheap beer - serves a wide range of (often local) real ale in most of their pubs. Many thousands of British pubs are members of Cask Marque, a voluntary accreditation scheme that requires regular inspections of their cellar-keeping and the quality of their beer. America has a burgeoning beer culture, but much of the country is still a beer desert where the only widely available beers are pasteurised lagers. The effects of prohibition are still being felt today, because it takes generations to develop a proper beer culture.
https://camra.org.uk/
https://cask-marque.co.uk/
This would have been true decades ago. It hasn't been true anytime recently, even more than a decade ago. At this point, craft beer is available bottled and canned in the typical supermarket and even gas station/convenience store in the US, even dive bars have at least one tap for craft beer or at least some bottles (although it is likely not going to serve it in high quality glassware), and craft beer makes up more than a quarter of the total dollars sold in the US beer market and nearly 15% of the volume.
You say this, but at the same time, the most popular beers drunk in every European country are pasteurised lagers as well. In fact, lagers are popular /all over the world/ for the same reason: They are light, easy to drink, cheap to produce and buy, and refreshing when served cold in hot weather.
I've been in plenty of historic pubs in the UK that were unfortunately acquired and ruined by Wetherspoons. A Wetherspoons is in no way any better than the average dive bar in the US, except that in the US it is commonplace for a bar to serve only alcohol and no food, where in the UK pubs are generally expected to have food.
Maybe what you are saying is true in the UK, but gp is right for Germany - I don't know anyone here who would complain about the glass their beer was served in.
Also, most of what counts as craft beer in the US wouldn't even legally pass as beer here.
Beer drinking being casual isn't a counter argument. Even if its a minority, there are a lots of beer 'nerds' who take drinking beer seriously. And those are usually the people who have some amount of influence threw various mechanisms.
As a Guinness fan I gladly go to a pub that does it correctly, compared to one that doesn't.
So the idea that there is a business impact to having lower quality experience even visiaul can not just be ignored by saying 'drinking is causal'.
As a pub you have to try to offer something that you can't get from aluminum cans in the park.
I suspect the controversial proposition, whether intended or not, is that everyone in countries with a notable beer tradition is a snob who will refuse to drink anything but the best served according to the most exacting standards.
Clearly, this is false, and it is enough to visit such a country or look at beer sales to know that this is the case.
At the same time, I will agree that the average beer and what is considered "drinkable" in probably any European country is significantly better than the swill that passes as average in the US.
Correct. Beer is the one item in Britain that is acceptable to send back. My pet peeve is beer served in a glass that is still warm from the dishwasher.
Food, god no, wouldn't want to cause a fuss. Uncooked chicken? I'll just push it to the side and eat the rest.
Really? You're not just being facetious?
I NEVER send food back if I just don't like it. If it's under-seasoned or not up to my standards, no big deal. I'll go elsewhere next time.
But if it's a food safety issue, or if I order something pricey and it's missing a key ingredient (they don't have to take it back in that case, just bring that ingredient to the table and we're good). I mean, if you paid for it and you can't eat it because it's unsafe or you didn't get what you paid for ... that should be totally understandable and expected that it gets sent back. I've worked in food service and while I would never spit on anyone's food no matter how much of a dick they are, I wouldn't even feel the temptation if it was a legit kitchen screw-up.
No my friend it was just a joke about British manners
I thought Brits hate head on beer.
No, they just hate excessive head that is inappropriate to the beer. Some amount of head is essential to properly release the aroma of beer. A traditional cask ale is hand-pumped and served without additional gas, so it will tend to have a smaller head than a beer that has added gas. No more than 5% of the glass should be filled with head. Many pubs use glasses with a marked fill line, allowing for space for a head while still providing a full measure of liquid.
Northern drinkers traditionally prefer a thicker, creamier head and used beer pumps with a "sparkler" nozzle to provide this, while southern drinkers typically preferred very little head; this historic divide is starting to soften in recent years.
Some European beer styles are properly served with a bigger and frothier head, particularly wheat beers and pilsners.
It's a North-South thing
https://bucolicaholic.com/2016/09/01/on-real-ale-the-sparkle...
You are extremely incorrect on this point. I think this is true if you think of your typical dive bar in the US, but this is more a /cost/ point than a point of the beer culture. Dive bars are not expected to be good, just cheap. The best beers in the world of every style (except Belgian beers) are in made in the US. The US revived craft brewing and spread it around the world, and brought craft brewing to parts of the world that never had any serious beer culture. American beer is /far/ far more than light beers shotgunned out of a can in the parking lot during a college football game.
There are numerous craft bars in the US that take the quality of their pours, including the quality of the glassware very seriously. The US helped to pioneer the certification process for serving beer, modeled after that for wine. The BJCP was founded in 1985 in Colorado, as an offshoot of the American Homebrewer's Association, and the Cicerone Certification program was founded 25 years ago in the US as well. The US has done a significant amount, not just for itself, but for the world, to establish high standards of excellence for the making of beer and the serving of beer.
I say this as someone who is an expert on beer. I have traveled to more than 70 countries, in part specifically to drink beer. I have brewed beer for more than 20 years. I have judged beer competitions. I am a certified cicerone. I have drank more than ten thousand unique beers and been to more than 2500 breweries in my life. It is completely ignorant (and a nationalistic ignorance) to say that the US has a poor beer culture. This might have been true in the 1970s, it is not true today, and it hasn't been true for decades.
It's likely the washing process still scratches the glass but it's less visible. It doesn't increase the "safe" life of the glass, as bacteria is still able to get into those scratches.
Making the scratches obvious makes clear to the pub landlord that they need to be replaced (and tips patrons off so they'll put pressure on the landlord by not coming back).
>It's likely the washing process still scratches the glass but it's less visible. It doesn't increase the "safe" life of the glass, as bacteria is still able to get into those scratches.
Honestly, I've never heard of this before and I have friends working in the restaurant industry. Is it a real documented health hazard or a FUD spread by the glass manufacturers to create perpetual demand for their product (Glass As A Service)?
My grandma still uses the same glassware from like 30+ years ago and washes it by hand and it doesn't look tarnished at all. Is she and our family likely to die from drinking from those old glassware with micro scratches?
That's the key part here. Pubs use commercial dishwashers which effectively shot blast your dishes and glasses. There's a reason you can see "Not dishwasher safe" on certain items: because it'll blast off the nice patterns. I know because I've done it by accident.
Not sure what shot blast means, but as far as I know dishwashing machines just spray hot water and detergent on everything.
I guess that could cause abrasion if there's hard and sharp particles in the water, but I'm not sure what could cause those. Maybe if glass breaks during washing, but I'd assume the machine filters the water before reusing it.
There's a couple of sources:
- The dishwasher tablets have a mildly abrasive substance
- The water itself (especially in the UK) can carry abrasive substances from the pipes
If it was in the pipes, handwashing would do it too.
Dishwasher detergent does not contain abrasive substances; dissolve a teaspoon of it in a glass of hot water and see for yourself.
I’m not convinced because I can run pellets over a surface by hand and not scratch it, yet a shot blast will strip paint off easily.
Same substances with different processes produce different results.
> There's a reason you can see "Not dishwasher safe" on certain items:
I've nerve seen it on glassware though. That warning is usually for plastics since they melt at hot dishwasher water, and on certain metal cook-ware where the caustic dishwasher detergent will corrode the metal anodization, but glass is usually resistant to both temperature and caustic detergents, which is why it's used in bio labs for storing and mixing harsh chemicals, granted, different composition of glass, but it's still glass not adamantium.
So this point doesn't scan for me.
No but the process that strips the paint off delicate crockery is self-evidently abrasive, which stands to reason when you look at the scratch marks in glass that has been through too many cycles.
It's not on glass because an individual washing won't destroy it but repeated washing eventually scratches the glassware to hell. I've seen it with my own eyes.
Marks on glass are not due to abrasion, they appear because glass is slightly soluble in alkaline water, which is the case in dishwashers. Porcelain and stainless steel do not get scratched by dishwashers for example.
Thanks for the explanation! I guess this means there’s no way to make even “unbreakable” glasses to not mark?
I will be honest that sounds doubtful with at least the contraptions and process used in America. I guess its possible if you are just hand washing the glass?
I don't know what American bars use but the use of the term "pub" marks this out as a UK thing. I recall going to social clubs and other, cheaper, drinking establishments and seeing grotty glasses.
I know for a fact they use dishwashers (I've seen them) and that dishwashers scratch the hell out of your glasses (I've seen that too). Handwashing simply doesn't do this. Dishwashers work by, effectively, shot-blasting your dishes and glasses so I can see the mechanism by which your glassware will get scratched. I don't see how this happens when you're handwashing with Fairy liquid and a soft sponge.
My point being that the sani-wash that most all pubs/bars/clubs use would eliminate any bacteria hidden in scratches. Hence my caveat that I know America best and perhaps that is not the standard in other countries. A UK pub might not use these traditionally which may introduce sub-par cleaning.
Thank you for the explanation but already knew it, just going towards the part where commercial washers are less "soap" and more sani-solution.
Why would a pub landlord buy these glasses?
If a brewery is providing them, why would they let the glasses get into a state that their drinks look like shit in them?
Oh, if they get the glasses for cheap or free from the brewery, that makes sense.
Some pint glasses designed for lager are made with nucleation sites for the bubbles at the bottom, over time these wear out and make your pint of lager look 'dead' compared to a fresh glass. This is less of an issue with ales and other less carbonated drinks though.
They really shouldn't be, forcing CO2 out of suspension is exactly what you don't want. It causes the beer to become flat more quickly. This is why good beer bars use a glass washer right before serving, to remove any small particles that may end up in the glass and cause nucleation.
More quickly, like how quickly? Most pints are drunk within about 45 mins of pouring
You'll notice a difference right away, because the escaping CO2 breaks the head on the beer, which is exactly the opposite of what you want on a pilsner. As for going flat, I'd have to root around on Brulosophy later I think they did a test on this.
My experience is either the wrong soap or unclean water leaves a residue on the glass killing any beer. It likely also fills these nucleation sites.
It's a requirement of the volume calibration - beer glasses used for commercial purposes are classified as certified measurement devices under EU law, you have to print on the glass the year in which the required stamp got affixed [1]. This serves to provide the customer with a way to check if they're being sold the correct amount of beer.
Fun fact, this was a massive issue for stone mugs and led to a lot of confusion when the regulation became enforced [2].
[1] https://www.agme.de/?qs_servlet=downloadIxServlet&rq_RecId=3...
[2] https://germany.representation.ec.europa.eu/news/klarstellun...
I've posted a fuller reply, but they year on the M stamp is about certification of the tooling used to make the glass. This can be updated annually and so does give a decent indication of year of manufacture, but it is there as part of the Weights & Measures legislation and not about obsolescence / "use by" etc
Is this the case in reality? Everywhere I've lived drinking glasses were not accepted as part of domestic glass recycling due to their composition [0]
Perhaps there is a commercial recycling route for pubs though? A quick google didn't turn anything up.
[0] https://www.friendsofglass.com/ecology/what-glass-can-you-re...
I take that back then. Would these hardened glasses be recyclable though?
"Yes"
From a glass making point of view you don't want them messing with expansion coefficients and bulk properties so they're off the table there - it's a waste of energy to reheat them up to ~ 1,000 C.
But you do end up with large volumes of glass .. a relatively consistant material, you might want to crush and tumble that (to take the sharp edges away) and use that sized grit | frit as driveway material, as additive to concrete where structurally sound, as fish tank "sand", etc.
IIRC concrete aggregate should be jagged so that it interlocks with itself. You actually can't just use any old sand, you need sharp sand, which is an increasingly scarce resource.
"you need sharp sand"
Hmm, practical concerns about acquisition aside, would lunar dust work?
Yes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunarcrete
My bad .. mentally insert more commas and juggle the clauses :-)
The tumbling was only meant to be applied to application requiring rounded grit, you're correct that concrete and other uses might prefer jagged.
I assumed my city wouldn't accept drinking glasses due to safety issues. The assumption being that the most likely case someone would recycle a drinking glass is after breaking it and they don't want their workers getting cut. Turns out it isn't really compatible with recycling beer and wine bottles.
All the places I know (Denmark/Germany) the glass you want to recycles is getting dumped in containers where it breaks most of the time when you toss it in.
Interesting!
The recycling containers here have separate containers for clear glass and coloured glass and I've always thought glass is glass.
Now I checked in detail what is accepted, and sure enough, drinking glasses and mirrors are specifically disallowed.
AFAIK (but may be massively wrong) is that most clear glasses have many composition types and don't mix well and the industrial brown/green is all the same.
I never ran a restaurant but Googling around it seems like bars replace around 100% of the glasses annually due to breaking. That sounds like a lot...
I've never seen anyone collecting broken glass and putting it in a special glass-bin. The glass bin we have in Amsterdam isn't one that you can even push broken glass into if you wanted - it's shaped specifically to receive bottles.
Most resources online hint that the reason this hard glass didn't become successful is because there's a lot of profit to be made by reselling glasses when your old glass breaks.
It wouldn't take large shards of a plate window but it definitely can accept anything with one dimension that doesn't exceed 10cm or so, which is almost all the broken glass we've wanted to put into it.
I remember reading once that the average Martini glass has a lifespan of 3 uses in a bar environment. Very thin and easy to chip.
That may be, but rem ember of the three things you should be doing - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - Recycling is the worst and should be avoided anytime the other two are doable.
As another commenter mentioned, apparently they are not!
Also recycling glasses might not make much sense.
The raw material for glass making is basically sand, and there's no problem dumping old glasses in a landfill.
So you should only recycle glass, if that's cheaper than making glass from scratch. There's no benefit otherwise.
(And you can still reduce and re-use, of course.)
In any case, glass is chemically inert and eventually breaks down into sand so it's not a huge environmental issue, other than its bulk.
Most of the environmental issues with glass are on the other end - mining raw materials, refining those, manufacturing, etc.
With the small size of the UK it might make it easier to recycle. In larger countries glass might not always be recycled, it might cost more to recycle than to just produce new glass. The transportation cost/impact to lug around heavy glass to be recycled is not worth it.
I don't know why this was downvoted but this is absolutely a fact in places like America. You may want to feel all fuzy that you are recycling glass but unless you are geographically near a glass production plant, your glass most likely ends up in the landfill. It does not make economic sense to truck crushed glass around the country, there are not a large number of plants making glass.
I was first confused by this because here in France we have this popular practice, mainly at the school cafeteria, to look at the bottom of our glass to know how old we are (actually it's the mold number obviously...) and depending of the people, the younger (or the older) gets to fetch water for everyone else during lunch.
https://eu.duralex.com/en/blogs/inspirations/et-toi-tu-as-qu...
Recycling is not energy neutral. Far from it.
Clearly not. Spend 2 hours in any crowded bar or restaurant and you will hear the sound of glass smashing into pieces.
I think that is a TikTok 'story' which sounds reasonable and is spreading despite it being not true. Yes perhaps the year can be an indication of older glass and perhaps they have more wear, but that is down to use and care rather than just age and not what the year means.
The M mark indicates the year the tooling for that specific glass was certified and marked. Years ago the glasses were manufactured, then tested for capacity, and finally stamped to show they passed.
More recently the manufacturer, this is a major factor for plastic glasses which are moulded, has their process and tooling regularly certified and random samples regularly tested. This means they can be marked during manufacturing rather than an additional process.
This has a good overview of the markings on a UK drinks glass https://advancedmixology.com/blogs/art-of-mixology/what-does...
A bit of legislation from Trading Standards who police it. https://www.southwark.gov.uk/assets/attach/2503/Alcoholic-dr...
A bit of Government legislation about applying the mark. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/applying-a-crown-symbol-to-pint-...