Object of Desire: The Pretentious Beer Glass Company’s High Gravity Set

Craft beer has come a long way from its basic pint-glass origins. As brewers continue to create more and more high-octane beers, it’s easy to forget that the glass it is served in is just as important of a consideration for properly enjoying your beer.

Luckily, more bars and restaurants are getting wise to the idea of high-quality beer belonging in high-quality glassware. And while that’s a great thing for those who want to enjoy beer outside of the house, what of those who are anxiously awaiting the day they can finally raid the medley of stouts, sours, barleywines and more that are currently residing in their beer cellars? Or those who finally got the newest NEIPA release from that brewery two states over with the crazy Saturday morning lines? Enter the Pretentious Beer Glass Company.

PBGC was founded after a group of avid beer drinkers suggested that Knoxville, Tennessee, glassblower Matthew Cummings make customized beer glasses for their collections. Cummings took the time to design and create his first true beer glass for them in his spare time. As a result, he began to see a real lack of unique beer glasses in the market and thus, PBGC was born.

What makes PBGC so unique among other glassware companies is that it remains a one-man operation, with absolutely no machines used to shape the glassware. Each style of glassware incorporates months of beta testing by Cummings, starting with drafting paper designs, followed by crafting prototypes, then plenty of testing and refinement—and culminating with the perfect beer glass tailored to specific beer styles.

To find out whether or not I had simply been swayed by the cool aesthetic of the sleek vessels, I matched PBGC’s High Gravity Set against my bar’s own Rastal Harmony Wine Glasses—a tried-and-true winner for consuming craft beers of all styles. I wanted to determine if having style-specific glassware would actually elevate my beer-drinking experience.

The Sauvin glass, named after the Nelson Sauvin hop, was recommended for use with a double IPA, so I paired it with Celestial Beerworks’ Lunar Double IPA. The glass provided a nose that was softer, rounder and fuller than the control glass. The wine glass does concentrate aromas better, but the result in this case made the nose a bit too sharp, with additional boozy notes that weren’t present in the Sauvin glass.

Shockingly, the taste of the beer is also creamier in PBGC’s Sauvin. The wider mouth of the glass floods the palate instead of concentrating it on one point on the tongue, leading to a more gentle expression of the hops in the beer and making for a better experience overall. The smaller base is designed to keep your hands from heating up your IPAs faster than you can drink them. It’s a very nice touch that allows the bulb above it to look great in your hand.

For the PBGC Aromatic glass, I decided to use a beer that should leap out with aromas, if concentrated correctly. A vintage 2015 bottle of Westvleteren 12 sounded like the perfect fit for this. In the control wine glass, the aroma is malt sweetness, raisins and a fair amount of booze. Yet again, the PBGC glass’ nose is much lighter on the booze, boasts deeper raisin notes and even some lighter caramel. Beer certainly does smell better out of this Aromatic glass. As far as taste goes, the control glass was again sharper and allowed for the taste of a touch of oxidation, with a really smooth body, with less raisins and more sweet red grapes than the nose would have led you to believe. In the Aromatic glass, the taste is once again much fuller than the wine glass in terms of body. I found that the flavor is a little more forgiving in this glass as well, as the oxidation was hidden a little more in this glass, whereas that imperfection was a lot more apparent in the wine glass.

Finally came the PBGC Imperial glass, and with it, an imperial Baltic Porter collaboration from two amazing breweries, Põhjala & Jester King. Over Easy is the newest barrel-aged beer to come out of the Estonian brewery and land in the United States, this time featuring port-wine-barrel aging and caramelized Estonian birch syrup. The control wine glass nose is a great mix of heat and dark chocolate, with some heavy roasted malt on the end. A quick swirl of the control glass makes the porter smell a little bit heavy on the alcohol. The Imperial glass seems to almost match the wine glass on the nose, but again, this beer is relatively new. It could just need a little bit of cellaring to age away those harsher alcohol notes. As far as taste goes, the wine glass is heavy-handed on the booze front but pulls a deep port note from the beer, complete with wood.

The Imperial glass drinks with a lot more heft. Its wider mouth definitely helps coat the palate much better, lending much more woody aspects of the port barrel. Even the chocolate notes are more full bodied and richer, and the port feels so much sweeter and more blended together with the rest of the beer. Combined with a stemless design that allows your palms to warm up dark beers, this glass is outstanding for dark beers.

Pretentious Beer Glass Company glasses can be purchased individually through the PBGC Etsy site, but it’s worth it to buy them as a set. (Each one is priced at $47.50, while you can get a trio for $117.50.)

So am I going to replace all my commercially viable wine glasses with these sensational and dapper beer glasses? Probably not just yet. But when I’m at home and staring down the mountain of beer that’s accumulated from my obsessive cellaring, it’s nice to know I have the proper glassware at hand to enjoy any of those brews in glasses that present them in their best possible light. Pretentiously.

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