Over the weekend my wife announced that I had to do something about my beer glass collection.

Seems she thought it was taking up so much space in the cupboard where we keep the glassware that there was no room left. Not that I disagreed – as the person in the house who does the washing-up I knew how tricky it was when putting glasses away.

So I found another cupboard, one that we used to store stuff we never use (like a ceramic beer stein someone gave me from Europe. Sorry, but there’s just something wrong about drinking beer from a ceramic container). I took out all that stuff and put in all my beer glasses – which you can see in the above picture.

While I’m sure there are people out there with way more glassware than me, I was still surprised at how much I had when it was all placed in one location. Funnily enough, of the 11 glasses in there, I’ve only actually paid for one of them. That would be the tall wheat beer glass at the back.

We bought them as a set not because I wanted to use them to drink hefeweizen but because they looked cool. Of course we soon realised that glasses designed to fit in the extra head of a good hefe weren’t suitable for any other sort of beer, because we ended up with about four centimetres of space between the top of the beer and the lip of the glass. Also, they were a bastard to clean.

The other glasses, well, some were sent to me by very nice people – including the Craft Beer Industry Association – others were supplied by bottle shops or distributors. One or two came from beer events I attended with a media pass – such as GABS. And the pilsner glass up the back was a Christmas gift from an old boss – again bought before I knew it was a pilsner glass.

Do I use them all? Pretty much, even the small GABS glass, which is pressed into service as a tasting glass for the hydrometer samples of my homebrew.

The only one that doesn’t get used much is the wide-bodied schooner glass that was made to promote the LifeStyle Channel series The Pub With One Beer, about Picton’s King George IV Inn. But that’s because, with so many nice glasses to choose from, why would I use a stock-standard schooner glass?