glassware is not an easy topic to address concisely: over the thousand-odd years during which there has been a well-documented spirits industry at least in one part of the world or another, people have poured those spirits, mixed or unmixed, into a dizzying array of glasses: dram glasses, punch glasses, rummers, tiffs, chimneys, tulips—the list goes on and on. The 1913–1914 Albert Pick & Co. hotel- and restaurant-supply catalogue features sixty pages of glasses, illustrated to the tune of some thirty to the page. And that’s just the standard American stuff. There are more kinds today even in America, and once one factors in the rest of the world—15-ml Chinese baijiu glasses, 50-ml Serbian čokanj flasks (for rakija), copitas for mezcal, absinthe glasses, tiki mugs, the huge stemmed goblets they serve the Negroni Sbagliato in at Bar Basso in Milan, on and on—there is no hope of covering even a representative sample of them all. Given that, it seems wise to focus on the few basic types that serve as the backbone of modern bar service.
The American bar of the early nineteenth century, with its novel devotion to the ins and outs of iced drinks, changed this around slightly. For one thing, Americans didn’t like stems as much as the British did: early American glasses tended to sit right on the bar, foregoing the commanding elevation a stem gives. The dram glass became a whisky or brandy glass, which held some two ounces (60 ml) and maybe a little more and had a heavy bottom, in part to give it the illusion that it held still more. After Prohibition, this shrank into the one-and-a-half to two-ounce (45–60 ml) shot glass, with the same heavy bottom.
Next in size was the “small bar glass.” Heavy-bottomed and slant-sided, this glass held five or six ounces (150–180 ml) and was used both for mixing and for serving cocktails and other “short drinks.” In his 1862 The Bar-Tender’s Guide, Jerry Thomas specifies it for smashes, slings, toddies, spirit-based sangarees, fixes, skins, the Knickerbocker, the Blue Blazer, and of course the various cocktails—“short drinks,” as they called them in Europe. See Thomas, Jeremiah P. “Jerry.” By the 1880s, its mixing use had fallen by the wayside, and it was used mainly for the Old-Fashioned (basically, a whisky cocktail as it had been made before syrup, straining, and stemware) and related drinks, such as New Orleans’s Sazerac Cocktail, for which it is still used. See cocktail and Sazerac cocktail. In the 1930s and 1940s, the size of the glass began creeping up as Old-Fashioneds gained bulky fruit garnishes; by the end of the 1940s eight- or nine-ounce (240 or 270 ml) versions were common, followed rapidly by the 12- to 16-ounce (360–480 ml) Double Old-Fashioned, aka “bucket,” glass. Eventually this edged out the single glass. By the end of the century, a preference for straight sides rather than slanted ones had turned the glass into a squat, heavy-bottomed cylinder. Nowadays, the bucket glass is used for straight spirits, spirits on ice and rocks, and drinks such as Old-Fashioneds, Caipirinhas, and Margaritas; the single glass is only found holding Sazeracs, and even that is rare.
Just as there was a small bar glass, there was also a large bar glass. This was a tall, slant-sided affair that held 12–16 ounces (360–480 ml). As with the small glass, this was both a mixing glass and a serving one, since the custom was to mix drinks in the glass in which they were served. With the introduction of the shaker tin in the 1840s, that did not change. Punches, guleps (often shaken at the time), beer- and wine-based sangarees, eggnogs, and other “long drinks” (as the Europeans dubbed them) were all built, shaken, and served in the glass.
As glassware became more specialized, it became far less common to use the large bar glass as a service glass or the small one as a mixing glass. By 1900, a bartender might serve the occasional Mint Julep in the large glass or mix a Sazerac in the small one (that was the nostalgic ritual that the Sazerac House came up with for the drink), but usually the large glass was strictly for mixing and the small one strictly for serving drinks in. This usage lasted throughout the twentieth century, although with the craft beer movement of the 1970s the pint mixing glass got drafted to serve as the American pint beer glass (Americans had not previously made much use of pints for beer, so these were the only pint glasses that most bars had).
Nowadays, since bars are very well stocked with pint glasses, they are also used for large rocks drinks such as the Bloody Mary and often take the place of the Collins glass. Many bartenders, however, prefer to shake drinks in all-metal shakers and stir their drinks in cylindrical Japanese-style spouted glasses (the parallel sides make stirring much easier, as the ice has more room to move).
Once bartenders were stirring their cocktails with ice and then straining them off it (as Jerry Thomas detailed for his “fancy” cocktails), the drink demanded a stemmed glass, so that the patron’s hand would not be chilled by the drink and his drink not warmed by his hand. For the cocktail glass, the answer to this problem, see
When, in the 1850s, the sour was a new drink, it went into the same small bar glass as socktails and other short drinks. But once the cocktail got its own stemmed glass, there was a problem. All the ingredients that went into a cocktail were supposed to add up to one two-ounce (60 ml) jigger, give or take a spoonful here and a dash there. Sours, however, began with a jigger of booze and then added citrus juice and a sweetener, and often a red wine float. This meant that they wouldn’t fit into the standard cocktail glass. Enter the narrowish, tapered, footed five- or six-ounce (150–180 ml) sour glass. Without the foot, it was a “Delmonico” glass, named after the famous New York restaurant. By the twentieth century, the standard sour glass often took on aspects of the champagne flute, with a short stem and sides that gently curved in at the top, although the older, slant-sided version was—and is—still common. When cocktail glasses got bigger, sours could be served in them, too, and the sour glass began falling away. See sour.
The fizz glass and the Collins glass round out the traditional suite of barroom glasses. Both were introduced in the 1870s, both were cylindrical, and both were narrow, so that the carbonated drinks they were meant to hold would stay that way. The Fizz glass, however, held about six ounces (180 ml), while the Collins glass, meant to hold ice as well as citrus and gin, held two to four times that. With the introduction of the highball in the 1890s, it went first into the fizz glass, and then an intermediate 8- to 12-ounce (240–360 ml) glass bridged the distance between the fizz and the Collins glasses. See Collins; fizz; and Highball.
One could go on, through champagne coupes (sometimes used for cocktails) and flutes (also used, although less commonly), to the specialized glasses demanded by various nitpicky drinks such as the Pousse Café, the Irish Coffee, the Hurricane (a huge glass modeled on the hurricane-lamp chimney glass), the Moscow Mule (a copper mug, because why not), and on to tiny cordial glasses, enormous brandy snifters, and so forth. But it is always worth remembering the immensely popular bar the late Gary Regan worked at on New York’s Upper East Side during the 1970s, which stocked only one kind of glass. Whatever you ordered, it went into a white wine glass. Nobody complained. See Regan, Gary.
Albert Pick & Co. General Catalog 1913–4. 1913; repr., n.p. Ross Bolton: 2008.
DeGroff, Dale. The New Craft of the Cocktail, rev. ed. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2020.
Hartshorne, Albert. Antique Drinking Glasses. New York: Brussel & Brussel, 1968.
Johnson, Byron A., and Sharon P. Johnson. Wild West Bartender’s Bible. Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1986.
Morgenthaler, Jeffrey. The Bar Book. San Francisco: Chronicle, 2014.
Wondrich, David. Imbibe!, 2nd ed. New York: Perigee, 2015.
By: David Wondrich