Overheard in a beer group on social media recently: "I'm bringing beer to a friend's house, and he doesn't usually drink craft beer. Is it OK to bring glassware for my beer, too?"

Oof. OK, where to begin here...

I know it's come up before, but I ran into this one again recently. There's really two questions here: is it socially OK for me to show up with my own beer and my own glassware, and does glassware matter that much?

First Things First

For the first question, in this particular inquiry, the answer has to be "no." It's not OK for you to show up with glassware. I don't know you, and I don't know your friend, and I don't know what kind of beer we're talking about, but I can still answer this question, logically:

If your friend took beer seriously enough to not potentially be a little put off by this, he'd probably have a decent stock of glassware on hand already. Maybe I'm just being overly sensitive, but I think you're running a risk of looking like a snob rather than a geek in this case.

Look, I shudder a bit, too, when I see someone pull out a frozen mug for me when they see I have "good" beer, but I think the more neighborly thing to do is just stall for a minute while the glass warms up a bit and then pour. No one's going to thank you for educating them on glassware - except for people who wouldn't likely need that education.

So, on to the second part of the question: just how much does it matter?

Glassware Matters...and Doesn't

Short answer? It matters, and more than a lot of people think. Volume, shape, curvature and size of the bell, stemmed or not, wall thickness, even glass type make a difference, and if I was at home I'd always reach for a stange for my Kolsch, a snifter for my Barleywine, a tulip for my IPAs, and a dimpled mug for my Mild. I've done side-by-sides, and you do find a noticeable difference.

You've probably heard this before, but the shaker pint glass isn't really a great vessel for beer. Tuning your glass choice to your beer style is a good call, assuming you're in a position to do so without suggesting your friend is a hick for not having an 18-karat gold-lipped chalice on hand.

But at the same time, it doesn't matter so much that you should be losing sleep, friends, or tolerability over it. Blind Pig is an excellent beer, whether served in a tulip glass or a conch shell, and would still be pretty good even if you drank it from a lightly-used dip spit can. On the other hand, that low-carb macro lager I had at the finish line of the Delaware Marathon last week was disgusting, and would have been even if it had been served out of a platinum chalice crusted in jewels in a mosaic of Emma Stone's stunning vampire-person face.

So, if you have the option, fit your beverage to your glassware. But if it's not practical, or polite, or reasonable, then enjoy your beer anyway. I suppose I could see an exception for some rare and expensive beers where I'm only going to get one shot at it, but if it's just a question of "will I enjoy it," glassware alone is going to matter a lot less than the beer's quality, how it's been treated since it left the brewery, its temperature, and a bunch of other factors. Drink up.

The marginal improvement is worth it, but not at the expense of just about anything else. Factor the non-beer-enjoyment-related stuff into your calculus.

The Go-To Glass

Is there a brewer in the world that doesn't end up with too many damned pint glasses? I swear, I could smash every one I drink from into the fireplace, Greek-wedding-style, from now until Rapture and I'd still have a cabinet full of shakers on hand for the next round with my fellow-denizens of the post-Apocalyptic hellscape. Here's to you, Scarlet Woman - and Scarlet Beast, for that matter.

But if you're looking to stock up on good go-to glassware, I have a humble recommendation: the water goblet.