I’m delighted that my column about dimpled pint pots a few weeks ago sparked a spirited response from readers.
Clare P used to own a pub on the North York Moors and said: “We had a stash of dimpled jugs for the old stalwarts who preferred them, but they rarely got used. Our biggest revolution…was when they outlawed pints of hand-pulled real ale with the frothy ‘ice cream’ head…The taps had to be adjusted to stop any beer flowing back into the barrel and the glass had to have a full pint of beer, often marked on the side, before you got to the head. So the frothy heads disappeared. There was quite a lot of groaning from the regulars, but they adapted!”
Steve P came up with an ingenious DIY solution to preserve his treasured frothy head when drinking from a dimpled pint glass at home: “I couldn’t find one with a head saver…so I had to etch my own using a Dremel…perfect!” Stewart P says he also misses the dimpled pot for bitter and adds: “I generally enjoy drinking out of big glasses. It saves downtime.”
Gareth C is not impressed with the modern Pilsner glass, declaring it a ‘liar’: “It has a bulb at the top, so the top half of height contains more than 2/3 of the drink. This means that when it looks like it is half full, you have hardly any left.” Good point Gareth!
Some establishments still use the old-style glasses, including, as Andy W reliably informs us, Wetherspoons in Stockport. Michelle C still uses them in her establishment too: “Some guys love their cask ale from them,” she says. Allan J is not in that camp, declaring it is like “drinking your beer out of a jam jar!”
Jim A says he associates handled and dimpled glasses with lager because that’s how they drink it in Germany, and he pairs straight glasses with draught ale: “It tastes the same, but the glass has to be right for the drink. I drank lager when I was young out of dimpled glasses, the ‘real’ men (old blokes) had pints of bitter in straight glasses.” I find that interesting, because I would have said it was the other way round, but perhaps Jim and I belong to different generations, so our memories differ. Billy G also remembers drinking lager out of dimpled pint glasses, and I know for a fact that he is much younger than me!
Nick G and John D both suggest a more sobering reason as to why the dimpled pint pot disappeared: “Unfortunately,” says John, “They did not shatter as do the modern pint glasses and as such could be used as a weapon when broken, the handle being used by the perpetrator to give more force when used in a pub brawl.” Cripes!
Lydia W points out that dimpled pint pots not marked with the pint or litre line cannot legally be used any more, although Anne H believes that you can use them in certain establishments. Alan B says that beer glasses are now a certain shape to enable the bubbles to keep rising to the top and so stop the drink going flat. He is also glad that the rule about marked pints has come in: “I used to hate it when I had lager and lime and was given an old glass not marked to the line. The publican used to put less lager in and charge me for the lime!”
Andrew H had a similar complaint: “I had a pewter pint pot with my name for my 21st birthday. I left it behind the bar at my local…Friends asked me how I knew I had a pint as the head could not be seen.” After a good two years of drinking it that way, Andrew decided to take it home to measure it himself, and sure enough, it was well short of a full pint. “I bet my last penny the landlord and his bar staff knew they were fiddling me,” he grumbles.
Stephen G is straight to the point when it comes to the the dimpled glass: “Too flipping heavy,” he complains. But of all these comments, I think my heart lies with the one from Alison M.
“Mine’s a bottle of Pinot,” she says, “Happy to put it in a pint glass.”
Cheers to that!
Read more at countrymansdaughter.com. Follow me on Twitter @countrymansdaug
This column appeared in the Darlington and Stockton Times on 8th and Ryedale Gazette and Herald on 8th September 2023
The Countryman's Daughter 