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The Asturian cider glass

Why is the Asturian cider glass so wide and thin?

In short

The Asturian vaso is a plain, unstemmed, straight-sided tumbler with an unusually wide mouth and unusually thin walls, and it is designed for one operation: catching a stream of cider falling most of a metre.

The width gives the pourer a target; the thin wall lets the impact spread and foam rather than deaden; the plainness suits a glass that is shared, rinsed by the discarded last mouthful and set down wet.

It is one of the few genuinely purpose-designed cider vessels in Europe, and it is unintelligible without the pour.

The design and its reasons

The glass is a straight or very slightly tapering cylinder with no stem and no foot, a mouth wide relative to its height, and walls thin enough to be conspicuously light in the hand. It holds considerably more than the measure ever poured into it, which is the first clue that its capacity is not what it is for.

Every feature answers to the pour. A wide mouth is a large target for a stream arriving from above head height, delivered by someone not looking at the glass. Thin walls transmit the impact rather than absorbing it, and the shallow angle of a wide glass held tilted presents a broad surface for the stream to strike and spread across, which is what generates the momentary foam.

The absence of a stem matters for the same reason. The glass is held tilted and low, passed from hand to hand, set down repeatedly and emptied onto the floor; a stem would be fragile, would interfere with the grip, and would keep the fingers away from the point where the cider actually is.

Thin glass breaks. Asturian glasses are consumables, produced cheaply in quantity and replaced constantly, and this is accepted as part of the running cost of a sidrería rather than treated as a problem to design around.

Shared, rinsed and passed

In the traditional service one glass serves a group. The pourer fills it, a drinker takes it, drinks the culín in one and throws the last mouthful away, and the glass returns to be filled for the next person. The discarded remainder rinses the rim, which is the practical answer to the obvious objection to a shared vessel.

The plainness of the glass supports this. There is nothing to identify one glass as anyone’s, no decoration to distinguish it, and no reason to keep track of which is which. A design that encouraged personal attachment to a particular glass would work against the way the vessel is used.

Individual glasses are now common, and in many contexts standard, which changes the social arrangement more than it changes the pour. Where each drinker has their own glass, the sequence of pouring, drinking and passing that structures the traditional service is loosened, and the group drinks in parallel rather than in turn.

Compared with its neighbours

The Basque glass is a straight tumbler too, but narrower and heavier, because the Basque pour arrives horizontally from a barrel tap over a short distance rather than falling from height. The target does not need to be as large and the impact is less violent.

The Hessian Geripptes is small, thick, ribbed and robust, because the Hessian tradition pours gently from a jug and asks the glass to do nothing except be held securely in a greasy hand and make a hazy drink look bright.

Three still ciders, three service problems, three completely different glasses. This is a good illustration of a general point about cider material culture: the vessel is a solution to a serving problem, and reading it backwards tells you what the problem was.

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