When Sam Fitz was a teenager, there was only one way to drink draft beer, and that was the 16-ounce shaker glass: The sturdy, straight-sided, stackable vessel you see at restaurants and bars, serving suds and sodas alike.
He didn't mind that the shaker's flat planes often resulted in a palm-warmed beer. He didn't notice that its lack of a bowl prevented the drink's aromas from proper release. Why consider those sorts of formalities, when for Fitz, "the end result was to get drunk"?
These days, Fitz sees beer through different colored goggles, and sips it from curvier glasses. He's now beer director at Washington D.C.'s Pizza Paradiso, a local chain that's regularly voted king of D.C. craft beer destinations, and often gets credited as having brought high-brow brew culture to the city. Fitz juggles the costs and tastes of 16 draft beers, 250 bottles, and 14 cans, poured into five kinds of vessels: A 9-ounce snifter, a 12-ounce tumbler, a 12-ounce tulip, a 16-ounce German-style mug, and a 20-ounce glass for Heifeweisens.
Under Fitz's watch, there's not a shaker glass in sight. The glass he once hardly noticed in the race towards sloshdom he now detests. "Shaker pints were never meant for draft," Fitz says. "They're the worst thing that ever happened to beer."
And it's not just at Pizza Paradiso. In more and more bars across the country, the little-recognized shaker is slipping out the back door. And among beer's devotees, the end of the glass that defined a century in beer can't come soon enough.
-So Long, Shaker Pint: The Rise and Fall of America's Awful Beer Glass
[Photo: AP Photo/Keith Srakocic]
