Martini lover , this will ring a gong . You place your cocktail of choice ( up , naturally ) . The bartender chill an angular , fishbowl - sized cocktail glass , then pours , stirs and strains your swallow into it — mightily up to the rim . And you ’re screwed . No matter how carefully you pick this monstrosity up and bring it to your lips , it careen . You over - right . Booze ends up all over your shirt , your shoes and the attractive stranger next to you .
This is not your fault . It is not the bartender ’s fault . And it definitely is n’t the attractive unknown ’s geological fault . The culprit in this situation is obvious : the cocktail glass .
Cocktail glasses ( also know as Martini glasses ) were n’t originally design for ego - sabotage — nor for their aesthetics . The long stem keep icing - gratis potable from being warm by the imbiber ’s hand . The wide oral cavity is intended to showcase a cocktail ’s aromatic posy , as well as , legend has it , to help Prohibition - era drinkers quick knock down their boozing if a speakeasy was being foray into . But while two of these three reasons still treat the needs of today ’s drinker , that third one is where we run into job .
When they were originally contrive in the other 1900s , v - shape cocktail glasses were much smaller , typically bear about four ounces of liquidity . They remain thus until ’ L and ’ 60s . After that , Martinis go away out of fashion during the repose back squalor of the ’ 70s . But when they came howl back in the mid ’ 80 , they had practically double in size of it . We imagine two glassware designers in the ’ eighty , blown to the moonshine on Peruvian go - dust , shouting back and forth at each other , “ Yeah , but what if we made it EVEN openhanded ? ” before leap into their Deloreans and soar upwards off to a Frankie hold up To Hollywood show . Thanks , guys .
Because what those two louts forgot was that these glasses were primitively plan to be easy to shed when the buttons foray into the succus joint and you needed to eighty - six your giggle succus pronto . It ’s a lot easier to keep it in the glass when you ’re only talking about four ounces of liquid . Today ’s cocktail glasses are clumsy , top - impenetrable monstrosities . A quick lookup of home goods retailers showed cocktail glass as big as twelve ounces . Pardon us while we shudder for a workweek . That matter may have been an outlier , but most of the chalk we saw come in around ten - snow leopard .
We are live through a golden long time of cocktails , yet too often we are basically drinking out of dribble field glass . Not to mention the fact that ten ounce Martinis have turned the three - Martini lunch into the three - Martini faceplant .
This is why , when a drink is think to be served up , we recommend a coupe . processed and serviceable for any touched cocktail , the sensibly sized , appropriately proportioned coupe cradle drinks , rather than act like some sort of demented cocktail catapult . It gives the drink a chance to breathe and show off its subtle aromatics , but sip from it does n’t require circus - worthy reconciliation skills .
dying to the cocktail glass . Long live the coupe .
