By Greg B. (Photos by Dan Shepherd) Since I started writing for this website, there have been untold benefits I’ve come across.  First, as a lover of food and beer, I’ve had many opportunities to try new beers, explore new restaurants, and attend great functions showcasing beer, wine, food or combinations of all of the above in artistic and interesting ways.  Honestly, one should consider it a blessing that in my spare time I get to really kick back and enjoy some of the finer things in life, and I am not one to forget it!  Recently I found myself at a new high, I received a sample of Spiegelau beer glasses with the goal of reviewing them.   I hummed and hawed about the appropriate beers to pour into the glassware, and I sampled a few beers in them and took photos with my digital camera before I realized that glassware this sexy almost demands better photos.  So I enlisted the help of a friend, Dan Shepherd, who has a great eye for photography, got some beers together, and made an event of it!

Spiegelau is one of the, if not the oldest crystal manufacturer in the world.  Just going to their website and looking around at the images should be enough to inspire you to recognize the fact that these are some Germans who know how to make crystal!  Their glassware is sexy, functional, and inspired.  And being gifted a set of Hefeweizen, Lager and a Stemmed Pilsener glassware is certainly an honor.  In a way, it almost seems fitting, to drink the one of the world’s oldest fermented beverages from the world’s oldest crystal producer!

The glasses themselves are works of art and are beautiful.  They are so light to hold, way lighter than expected when picking them up.  Made of lead free crystal will do that to a glass I suppose!  Interestingly, on both the lager and hefe glasses, the beer appears to really pour down low.  I know this sounds odd, but the glass looks deeper than a regular beer glass, which has a very heavy and thick bottom.  These glasses look almost as though they let the beer sit as low as humanly possible, and this is something I want to see!  The hefeweizen glass has beautiful curves to it, and I’m anxious to see how they encourage the expression of aromas from the wheat beer I’ll be pouring into it.  The lager glass is a straight up beer glass with a slight inward vertical tilt to the glass, whole should be nice to showcase some of the carbonation in a lager beer, by forcing more weight of the beer above onto a smaller area below, increasing the pressure and forcing the CO2 out of solution (yes, nerd talk, but it’s important!).  And the stemmed pilsener glass is just gorgeous.  With beautiful curves, both for the body of the glass but also curving outward at the tip, this is potentially the sexiest glass I have in the house.  It is also perfect for some of the darker beers I drink, but lacked the proper glassware for, say, a brandywine or hearty imperial stout.  So lets stop talking about how great they are to look at, but instead see how these glasses perform with beer in them!

Hefeweizen glass, .5L with Schneider Weisse – Schneider Weisse might just be the world’s best hefeweizen.  And I don’t think I’m alone in saying this, as it is one of the most classic breweries making this classic beer style, so it only seemed fitting that I reach back and bring out a traditional and great beer to sample this glass!  It almost looked as if the Spiegelau hefeweizen glass was made for this beer, the volume was perfect, the way the glass handled the 3″ of head from a classic hefe, and the beauty of the whole situation was great.  I may actually have worried my guests when I poured the beer, then stepped back and looked at it and said something along the lines of ‘yeah, now that’s a sexy beer!”.  Of course, part of that appeal is from the curves of the glass.  The beer pours a deep honey color with a thick foamy off white head rising up to meet the drinker, but leaving an amazing lace as it receded.  There are a great balance and playfulness between the banana and clove aromas, and to taste this beer has a great acidity that is mellow when drinking on it’s own, but is great with the guacamole dip I made (it cuts the fat perfectly, and the cloves hold their own with the jalapeno in the dip as well!).  The beer finishes with a clean wheatey malt flavor, and it’s just great.  But amazingly, when drinking from this crystal glassware, the glass is so thin it’s almost as if you’re drinking from air.  The beer is light to hold, beautiful to look at, and definitely fine to drink from this glass.  At this point, you are almost forced to more appreciate the beer, rather than just chug (though seriously, the schneider weisse is an extremely quaffable beer!).

Lager Glass, .5L with Clipper City Marzen – Initially, I sampled the lager glass with a bottle of Marke weltenburger pils, but my camera did not do this justice!  So for this photo, I pulled a bottle of great beer from a local brewery, Clipper City.  Their Marzen is a good American version of the classic Munich styled or Vienna lager.  Naturally, I then thought this may be a great beer to show off the glass!  Despite not having a second beer, to make up the volume to get a full .5L pour, Clipper City’s Marzen showcases the amber color with a tiny reddish hue.  The excellent angle of this glass and the simplicity of it really shows off this beer’s carbonation, but also channels the toasted malt aromas up and into the nose of the drinker (me!).  I think there are some more nutty flavors that really come out on the taste than I previously recognized in this beer, and I’d like to think that is due to the enhanced aromas I can get from this glassware.

Stemmed Pilsener, .4L with Bell’s Kalamazzo Stout- Wow, so I thought I was going to pull out Founder’s Imperial Stout from my fridge.  As it turns out, I had already drank this beer previously, and all I had left was Bell’s Kalamazzo stout.  But hoo-lee cow, this beer was the right choice!!  The glass is already gorgeous, as you may have noticed from the various pictures around this post, and I wanted to find a beer equally gorgeous to put into it, and I hit a goldmine.  Kalamazoo stout pours a dark chocolate color, and really matches that color with the aromas and flavors!  With this glass, the curves capture the aromas and let people who really enjoy the aromas of beer to get a chance to smell and enjoy it, and this beer needed to be sniffed and contemplated:  there were a lot of aromas to discern hidden in this one, unassuming beer!  The beer has a deep tan head that is thick and creamy which showcases some of the aromatics from the beer, and the out-curved top of the pilsener glass lets you take sips with ease to enjoy.  On the nose there are aromas of chocolate, almond, sweet milk, espresso and roasted dark malts, this is really a great beer already!  To taste, the beer continues with all the previously mentioned aromas and still goes farther.  The chocolate, nutty, lactose style sweetness are all present, but the addition of the slightly acidic roasted black malts and bitter espresso flavors really balance out this beer very nicely.  Coupled with a great level of carbonation and a velvety mouthfeel, this beer ranks right up there with Weyerbacher’s Heresy as a beer that, while great on it’s own, will also be superb with any number of desserts!  And I couldn’t think of a more elegant beer glass to pour this beer into, the stemmed pilsener glass really lets the beer do everything I wanted it to, show off the head, express aromatics, as you get deeper into the beer you can swirl and release more aromas to continue enjoying as the beer warms up a bit.  I don’t think anyone can look at the following picture and not say that is a sexy glass (with a sexy beer in it!).

So there you have it.  Drinking beer from Spiegelau’s crystal glassware, while initially may seem counter-intuitive to the beer drinker who pictures the rowdy glass clinking and table thuds of Okotberfest as the only setting in which one can really enjoy a beer.  But that stereotype is only but one facet of beer consumption!  The thinness of the crystal really makes it a great experience from which to drink, and the curves of both the hefeweizen glass and stemmed pilsener glass really help their respective beers demonstrate the aromatics that people (myself especially!) so want to smell while enjoying a good brew.  And the lager glass does a great job at maintain a simplistic appearance, but a functional and high class way of showing off the important aspects of a good lager.  Oh, and did I mention these glasses are apparently dishwasher safe?  I read that one  a few shopping websites selling these products… though I in no way condone placing such exquisite crystal in a dishwasher.  I expect to be drinking from these glasses for years to come and not just drinking, but pulling these glasses out for special beers that I really want to show off what the brewmasters created.