Glassware
Teku glass
A modern tasting glass designed with sensory input, now the default for aromatic craft beer.
Shape
A stemmed glass with straight angled sides meeting a sharply flared rim.
Typical capacity 300–420 ml.
Drawn to scale against the other glasses BeerHQ lists, so heights and widths can be compared between pages.
What it does
- Concentrates aroma. An inward-curving rim traps volatile aromatics above the beer, so more of them reach the nose.
- Keeps temperature. A stem or handle keeps the hand off the bowl, so the beer warms more slowly than it would in a tumbler.
- Presentation. Shows colour, clarity and bead. Conventional rather than functional.
Styles served in it
- American IPA
The defining modern craft beer: intense citrus, tropical and resinous hop aroma over a lean malt base, finishing firmly bitter.
- West Coast IPA
The dry, clear, aggressively bitter interpretation of American IPA, built on pine and grapefruit with the malt stripped right back.
- New England IPA
Hazy, soft and intensely aromatic: tropical and stone fruit hop character with deliberately low bitterness and a full, juicy body.
- Double IPA
IPA scaled up: more strength, more hops and more bitterness, while staying dry enough to remain drinkable.
- Milkshake IPA
A hazy IPA with lactose and fruit added for sweetness and a fuller, creamier body.
- American wild ale
A broad New World category of mixed-fermentation and barrel-aged sour beers, often fruited, with no fixed base style.
Evidence
What BeerHQ knows about this, and how. Every statement carries the state of the evidence behind it rather than being presented flatly as fact.
How much glass shape changes the experience of a beer beyond aroma concentration and head formation is disputed, and much published glassware advice asserts effects with no proposed mechanism.
— Trade and enthusiast position that specific shapes are matched to specific styles and materially improve them.
— The defensible mechanisms — aroma concentration, head formation and retention, keeping a hand off the bowl — are few, and effects claimed beyond them are largely convention presented as function.
BeerHQ requires every glassware recommendation to name a mechanism from a closed list, or to state plainly that the choice is conventional.
Genuinely contested Credible sources disagree, so both positions are given rather than one.
Sources: Tasting Beer (2nd edition) — print; The Oxford Companion to Beer — print
The idea that different regions of the tongue detect different basic tastes, sometimes invoked to justify glass shapes that "direct beer" to one area, has been understood to be a misreading of the original research for decades.
Backed by a source
Source: Beer: Tap into the Art and Science of Brewing — print