Do you guys give your glassware a quick rinse before pouring beer into it? I know some people say you should, just to get any foreign elements or whatever out of the glass. I decided to try it and noticed quite a difference in lacing and head retention. I know this is a really random post, just curious to see if anyone else does this.
I do! I am kinda meticulous about cleaning my glassware, but I've also noticed a huge difference between pouring into a dry glass and pouring into a wet glass.
I do rinse my glass before using it, but I make sure to shake it vigorously to ensure as much water as possible is gone.
It's pretty standard procedure to do this. Most bars that know what they're doing will give the glass a rinse before serving, either dipping it or using those cool upside-down spray dealies. It typically gives a better head presentation and will hopefully reveal any unclean spots on the glass before you put the beer in it. (That said, I don't always do it.) PS - does not apply to iced glasses for Millahs.
I'm with ya...even if I just washed the glass and it's sitting in the dry rack...I pull it out and give it a rinse. The head retention is 100% better and I agree with the lacing.
If it's a glass from by kitchen cabinet, the one that get used and washed often, I don't. If it's a glass from my cabinet in the garage, where I keep more specialty glasses that get used rarely, I'll give them a good rinsing before use. If I drink one beer out of a glass, and switch to a different kind of beer for the next one, I'll rinse it out between beers.
a lot of places now are using built in bar top glass rinsers. i say if top tier bars do it, then go for it.
I wish I had one of those at my house. It's so last year to be using a faucet Really though, those things are neat!
I've become anal about cleaning my glasses. I rinse with hot water, shake out excess, then sprinkle table salt down the sides of the tilted glass. If the salt sticks on all sides it means the glass is "beer clean", so I just rinse out the salt with cold water and shake dry. If the salt doesn't stick or is spotty, means the glass is dirty. I then use that salt as an abrasive and scrub the salt around the inside of the glass. Rinse and sprinkle again...and should be beer clean!
3 questions: 1) How much salt do you go through? 2) Doesn't scrubbing with salt act as an abrasive and put a bunch of micro-scratches in the glass? 3) Regardless of rinsing, does that make your beer taste a little salty? Sorry, I've just never heard of that, and a bunch of questions started popping in my head as I read your post
I don't use a lot, just a light sprinkle down the sides of a tilted glass while rotating it. The Morton's blue container of salt lasts a month or more depending on how much I am drinking. I have not noticed any scratches in the glass and the Morton's iodized salt is super fine. You don't want to use kosher or sea salt. And no the beer doesn't taste salty after the good rinse. If you Google "washing beer glasses with salt" one of the results is a Youtube video demonstrating it. That's where I picked the idea up from.
On Mohs' scale, sodium chloride has a hardness of about 2.5 while glass is about a 5.5. No danger of any scratches regardless of the size of the salt crystals. All I do is keep all beer glassware separate from other dishes when I clean them.
The bottle spritzers chill the glass a bit and the water covers the glass to hide nucleation points. The opposite effct of etching. Like pours will release less gas for a longer lasting head. I know of a bar that rinses the glassware in an ammonia solution before storage. So a rinse would be a must.
How exactly will the water hide the nucleation points? How long will it take for the beer to mix with the water, maybe 2 seconds? Rinsing with an ammonia solution seems... odd. What are they trying to accomplish with that?
The colder the beer the more the CO2 will stay is suspension. Also the less sudden bends or general agitation, the more the CO2 stay in the solution. Think of the water being like a lubricant. I think though that the chilling is the biggest benefit. The closer or if the glass is as bit colder than the beer the better. The ammonia might be for water spots. The bar that I speak of is in Amsterdam, maybe they have hard water.
