F*ck yes, comments!
Not that I'm out to bash the rather in-depth studies undertaken here, but they've both got one major flaw: they stacked the SA glass up against the least-expressive beer drinking vessel there ever was: the pint glass. Unless I'm out at a bar or restaurant and said restaurant doesn't have the sense to serve beer in vessels that accentuate its character, I never drink out of pint glasses. They rob me of the experience of actually being able to smell the beer. I mean, comparing the SA glass to a pint glass is like putting a Reidel Bordeaux glass up against a Solo cup in a wine tasting. No contest, but this much is obvious.
I drink my beer almost exclusively out of a Lucifer club-footed snifter, and sometimes out of a Unibroue glass which is not quite as bulbous. Sometimes I even drink it out of a Reidel or G&C Bordeaux glass. The shape of these glasses concentrates the aromas and directs them towards your nasal passages, this accentuating the nose of the beer. The pint glass, on the other hand, is woefully inadequate.
As I've said before in reference to the SA glasses, the best feature it has going for it is the rounded shape and smaller rim, to concentrate and direct the aroma into your nose. I've never denied the efficacy of this feature---but I
have pointed out that there are a million other glasses already on the market that are designed in exactly the same way, and I even have some glasses in my basement that have a similar shape as the SA.
The other feature that seemed to impress the testers here was the laser etching to facilitate bubbling. Maybe it's just the wino in me, but I've always just swirled my beer around when I want some bubbles (to accentuate the aromas). It seems to me that if it were constantly bubbling, it would go flatter faster, but I really am not sure about that. Either way...it's intiguing but not really all that important unless you have some kind of physical deformity that prevents you from swirling your glass a few times with your hand.
So, getting back to my original point: the tests weren't really "fair", because they pitted the SA glasses against a woefully inadequate competitor. Maybe the SA glass really is ten times better than my Lucifer snifter and my Unibroue stemmed glasses...but pitting it against plain ol' pinties can't tell me either way.
But nonetheless, I appreciate the efforts of the guys who did the tasting...Dude and Yuri. Can't say I'm surprised by the outcome, but it's cool that someone undertook it.
At the end of the day, my feeling is
not negative regarding these new glasses---to me, it represents a step forward in changing the image of beer from the bastard drink of the unwashed underclasses to a more sophisticated status closer to wine. And that's excellent! Georg Reidel went through a similar process in order to craft specific wine glasses for certain grape varietals or styles of wine, each of which accentuated its particular characteristics. I'd love to see more of this...I foresee someone coming out with sets of glasses for beer styles just like Reidel has done with wine (I'm not so ignorant to think that snifters are the best vessel for every style of beer). And so I appreciate SA's efforts and commend them for putting this out there. The only thing I've faulted them on is overselling the glasses with all their silly red arrows and laundry list of supposed features---like claiming that the rounded shape somehow keeps the temperature at the proper temp longer, or talking about the beaded lip creating "turbulence"---but none of that is to say that the glass doesn't possess valid features. It certainly does.
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