Last week, Dogfish Head and Sierra Nevada unveiled a new glass designed specifically for IPAs (“new IPA glass from Spiegelau” in their words) with a full video and mainstream media campaign unveiling it.

Fast forward a week or so and an interesting side-by-side image pops up over at our favorite industry ombudsman, A Good Beer Blog. (Note: his side by side is different than ours but we are essentially showing the same two glasses in our side-by-sides, just flipped).

To the left, the Riedel O-Riedel Series Red+White glass: seven inches high, holds seventeen and one quarter US ounces of fluid. To the right, the Spiegelau IPA glass, seven and one third inches high and holds nineteen US ounces of fluid. Riedel and Spiegelau are closely related companies or perhaps even two brands of the same international firm.

We should point out that Riedel was indeed bought the parent company of Spiegelau in 2004.

You can view the Riedel glass here.

In the video (below), Sierra Nevada and Dogfish Head founders talk a lot about the nucleation at the bottom of the glass as being a focal piece. The IPA glass comes with laser etching “to sustain carbonation and head” but they don’t discuss it in the four-minute video.

We just reached out to our media contacts at Spiegelau, Dogfish Head and Sierra Nevada asking what differences exist between the glasses outside of the slight changes in dimensions.