Ah yes. Kölsch Stange are 20cl, and get called test tubes derisively by people who are used to half litres. It’s supposedly because Kölsch is naturally carbonated, so goes flat easily. Never fear, they do regular refills (I can verify, and have repeated the experiment thoroughly, to ensure reproducibility of my results.).
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That’s so interesting. I used to go regularly after a social activity that drew quite a varied group to a suburban location, so it was a safe choice for all. I have no recollection of alcohol, but perhaps it was the nature of the group that nobody thought to order any, ever? I do know that they had veggie burgers, at least for a time, but I never ordered that. It was just more of a quick snack kind of place before everyone dispersed for the night.
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Where I live, getting a liquor license is not easy, cheap, or guaranteed. Thus, plenty of restaurants don’t serve any alcohol.
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A seed! A seed for a soon-to-be-a-viral-rumor that Applebee waters their beer!
Umm, that’s not how you measure… well, anything.
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A small man?
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Fascinated by this and by the replies. Very weird to me. Doesn’t USAnia have ‘weights and measures’ regulation? In UK it is not legal to sell beer (or spirits) in anything other than legally mandated units. Glasses have regulation filling marks on them, too. That way, consumers know what they are getting and can also be aware of the price of different tipples on a common comparison basis. A pub landlord found selling short measures, however advertised or priced, would soon be in trouble, both commercial and legal.
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What’s the difference between a small and large beer at Applebee’s?
Trick question? They closed the Applebee’s near us. (They blamed millennials.)
Or, as we called it, “Crapplebee’s.”
“Butt-wiper”
“Down with metric – we don’t need want no foreign ruler” – Cracked magazine, ca. 1981
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They put the beer in various glasses to help with taste and such. Additionally they also change based on ABV based on the sale of volume (to your point)
I personally drink stouts and porters so find myself most often served a tulip or snifter style. You get LESS ale by volume but higher ABV. Again depending on the exact style.
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“The pint’s a pound the world around” is one of the first things I remember my grandma teaching me, when she started to teach me to cook around 5 years old. That and base-12 are the reason why I can make recipe conversions in my head, and why I’m actually a proponent of the imperial system.
And the cast iron pans have to be dried in the oven every time. Don’t let grandma find one in the sink.
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I believe it’s illegal in the UK to serve beer in any increment other than multiples of a half (imperial) pint.
I’ll volunteer to measure the Kolsch! Hmmm, statistically speaking, I will need to test at least 10, and do so over multiple days…to account for varying atmospheric pressure and such…
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It’s not just an American thing. If you go to a bar in Flanders, they will have completely different glasses for each beer they serve, even though they will almost all be ales.
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But in Flanders, in the EU, the glasses may be different shapes, but will be marked as to capacity and will likely all be of a standard range of capacities, laid down by law / EU directive. Not the random sizes implied by quori
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1/3 and 2/3 of a pint are, oddly, also allowed - but almost never seen.
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Welcome to the land of the free, etc, etc. Here in the US, there are strict weights and measures rules about things that are required to be weighed or measured, but that is a specific list of items – gasoline, items priced specifically by weight (like meat), packaged liquids in marked containers (like milk) – and lots of stuff isn’t on the list, and draught (or as we bastardize it: draft) beer is one.
Every bar can use whatever glasses they want to and also to pour however they want. In el cheapo chain restaurants like Applebees, I’m pretty sure they don’t even train their bar staff (which most typically is just the wait staff, not actual trained bartenders) on how to pour, so you wouldn’t get consistency from beer to beer.
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No, but now they need to add it to the sketch somehow.
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“Come drink a dekalitre with me!”
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I read that as a reference to the shapes of the glasses, not their volumes - some beers come in stemware, some in cylindrical tankards with handles, some in slightly fluted glasses or ones with a bulge around 2/3 of the way up etc.
In Canada, there is technically a legal definition of a pint (568 mL, 20 imperial fl oz) - but it is a rare bar where you can ask for a pint of beer and expect the glass you receive to contain 568 mL of beer. Most bar owners seem to think “pint” just means “largish glass of beer,” being in practice anywhere from 15 to 22 oz. There is certainly no requirement that beer glasses have volumetric markings on them.
Yeah - I am well aware of the many different styles of glass in general and that some brewers prefer a particular shape. But the original comment was about size not shape, and I assumed this was what was meant when a follow-up comment noted that bars charge by alcohol strength and volume of beer sold (which, incidentally, might be a better universal system because it would mean consistent pricing and that the consumer knows what they are getting, alcohol-wise; on the other hand people expect to drink a certain volume - pint, half-pint, etc - and are perhaps assumed to understand the alcohol strength of their chose tipple given that it is mandatory to display it at point of sale in many jurisdictions).
So my inference is that if they charge according to ‘units of alcohol’ rather than solely by volume, then there could a very wide and random selection of glass volumes. But maybe that wasn’t what was being said. And I was going to say that this is all getting too arcane and technical for a topic like this until I realised it all started by showing how two very different looking glasses had similar volumes! 
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