They make great gifts, a well, for the beer drinker we all know and love. What better way to mark an 18th birthday, a 21st, a 40th, than with a personalised pint mug or lager glass? Whatever his or her favourite tipple, you can guarantee they’ll enjoy it more drinking out of their own special glass.
Why do we all like our own British pint beer glasses so much? Well, it probably stems from a kind of unacknowledged recognition of hygiene issues in days of yore. Back before pubs had super high speed multi temperature guaranteed to kill every germ under the sun glass washers, personalised pint beer glasses were pretty much the only way to be sure that you weren’t sharing your mug with the plague-ridden folk from across the road, or that funny bunch of farmers who were always going down with pig flu. Bear in mind, of course, that “personalised” in this sense didn’t necessarily refer to a glass with a name or initials etched in it: just to a glass that everyone knew was yours and yours alone.
And why not? The one thing that a non-local pub (a local pub being simply the one in which you feel most at home) can never avoid, is its sense of mass production. Everyone drinks out of the same glasses, willy nilly, which makes them no more a part of the service than a plastic plate in a fast food restaurant. Personalised pint beer glasses, either visually or by dint of simple one person only use, elevate the service of the establishment in which one uses them to a cut above the rest. Given that the pub was originally the “public house”, it’s not hard to see why. Individual British pint beer glasses mark that home away from home as exactly that. Home.