Cider glasses through history

Everyday drinking vessels in rural England were horn, turned wood, leather, coarse earthenware and pewter, and cider was drunk from all of them. Horn beakers are common in museum collections from cider districts, being cheap, light, unbreakable and easily carried by someone working away from the house. Pottery mugs and jugs served in the kitchen and the cellar.

These vessels were shared as a matter of course. Communal drinking from a single cup or bowl was normal at every social level well into the early modern period, and the individual allocated glass is a comparatively recent and originally elite arrangement. The Asturian shared vaso is the survival of a general European practice rather than a regional peculiarity.

Storage and transport vessels form a separate and more distinctive class — the wooden costrel, the stoneware harvest jar, the flagon — because carrying cider to a field is a different problem from drinking it at a table.

English glassmaking in the eighteenth century produced a recognisable object known to collectors as the cider glass or cider flute: a tall, narrow-bowled drinking glass, frequently wheel-engraved with apple boughs, fruit, and sometimes a cider press or a mill. Some carry inscriptions relating to cider politics of the period.

The existence of these glasses is a substantial piece of cultural evidence. Engraved glassware was expensive and made for a specific purpose in households that could afford to distinguish one drink from another. That cider had its own decorated form places it, in that period and that class, alongside wine rather than alongside small beer — which is consistent with what the seventeenth-century writers on cider had been arguing for.

Several examples are associated with the political agitation around the cider excise of the 1760s, when a tax on cider provoked serious opposition in the western counties. Glasses engraved with slogans belong to a wider eighteenth-century practice of political glassware, and they are among the clearest surviving objects connecting cider to public affairs.

The narrow bowl of the cider flute is generally read as a response to a lightly sparkling drink, in the same way that the tall bowls used for early sparkling wines were. Bottle-conditioned cider in this period could carry a considerable amount of gas, and the seventeenth-century writers describe bottling practice in terms that make clear this was intentional.

As cider’s social position fell through the nineteenth century, its vessels followed. The characteristic containers of the farm era are the flagon, the jug and the plain mug rather than anything engraved. Glassware in rural drinking places was plain and functional, and cider was frequently served in whatever the house used for beer.

The twentieth-century licensed trade standardised on the stamped measure — the pint, the half-pint, and later the third — and cider was sold in the same glasses as beer. This had a consequence that is easy to miss: serving cider in a pint glass places it in the beer category perceptually, regardless of its strength, its acidity or how it was made.

Where cider was presented as a premium product it borrowed wine and champagne glassware, which places it in the opposite category. Neither is a cider vessel; both are borrowings, and the absence of a settled English cider glass is a real gap in the material culture rather than an oversight.