The history of cider vessels and glassware

The costrel is the characteristic object of the cider allowance: a small flask of wood, leather or glazed earthenware, with lugs for a cord, carried to the field and refilled at the farm. Surviving examples in West Country museum collections hold a modest quantity, which is a useful corrective to some of the more extravagant claims about daily consumption, though a man might refill several times.

Alongside the costrel came the harvest firkin and the larger cask taken out to the field on a cart, from which the day’s allowance was drawn. Horn cups and turned wooden cups were the ordinary drinking vessels, and leather blackjacks lined with pitch served in some districts.

None of this is specific to cider. It is the general material culture of drink among working people, and cider fits into it exactly as small beer does elsewhere in England. The specificity lies in the scale of the farm cellar behind it.

Cider was kept and served from wooden cask, and the vocabulary of the farm cellar is a vocabulary of cask sizes: firkin, kilderkin, barrel, hogshead, pipe. A farm making cider for a workforce needed a substantial cooperage, and the maintenance of those casks — scalding, sulphur candles, topping up — was seasonal work in its own right.

Cask material and condition affected the drink profoundly, though not in ways the makers could control. An old cask carried its own microflora and could sour a batch; a well-kept one gave slow, oxidative maturation of the kind now sought deliberately in barrel-aged cider. Much of what was distinctive about farmhouse cider came from vessels nobody had chosen for their effect.

Wooden cask gave way to glass-lined steel, then to stainless steel and to plastic tanks through the twentieth century. The change removed both a source of spoilage and a source of character, and it is one of the underrated reasons that mass-market cider stopped tasting like farm cider.

From the middle of the seventeenth century, strong English glass under cork allowed cider to be bottled, traded and cellared. Sealed bottles bearing a mark or a name survive from this period, and they belong to a specific social world: the estate that bottled its own cider and sent it to town.

The eighteenth century produced glasses made for cider. Surviving English drinking glasses engraved with apple boughs and fruiting branches are recorded in glass collections, and a small number carry slogans opposing the cider excise of the 1760s — objects that connect the material culture of drinking directly to a constitutional dispute.

These glasses are evidence for a brief period in which cider had genteel standing in England. They stop appearing as cider’s status falls in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and nothing comparable is made again until the modern revival brought stemmed cider glasses back for a different reason.

The pint glass became the default British cider vessel through the twentieth century, following beer, and with it came the assumption that cider is a long, cold, high-volume drink. The Asturian culín, poured in a small quantity from height into a wide thin glass, and the Frankfurt ribbed glass filled from a stoneware jug, are living demonstrations that the vessel is a cultural choice rather than a property of the drink.

The late-twentieth-century revival brought stemmed glassware to cider again, this time argued for on sensory grounds: a bowl that concentrates aroma and a stem that keeps a hand off the glass. Whether that constitutes a return to eighteenth-century practice or a borrowing from wine is a fair question, and the honest answer is that it is mostly the latter.