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Comment by ziofill | Hacker News Reader

> The Nadir Figueiredo glass […] maintains the beer cold through the most primitive of the processes: due to its low capacity, the beer is consumed so quickly that it has no time to get warm.

Brilliant! I want to add a trick that I learned from my father in law, who keeps his heavy-bottom beer glasses in the freezer.

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While great at keeping beer cold, the frosted surface creates tons of nucleation points for CO2 in the beer, overfoaming it in the process. And the coldness lowers volatility of aromatic compounds in the beer.

A freshly rinsed glass with a slower pour would produce tighter foam and the best temperature for enjoyment. See the Czech side pull taps: https://breweriesinpa.com/the-side-pull-tap-what-is-it-and-w...

"Americano" NF glass' inner surface is smooth, why would it create nucleation points?

Ice cold pilsener is a hallmark of beer drinking in Brazil, a mostly tropical nation where one wants its drinks to be as refreshing as nature allows.

They were talking about frost build-up from freezing a large stein glass. If any frost gets onto the inner surface of a glass, it creates nucleation points.

I sure was, thanks for noticing

But wouldn't that frost melt immediately upon contact with the (relatively) warmer beer?

Maybe foam creation is also immediate, and wins that race to some extent?

If you're drinking beer quickly from a small 19 cl glass, then beer going flat is less of a worry

The thing is, I kinda want the foam to happen in the glass and not in my belly

But it means you need more frequent attention from the server or bartender, which the pub owner won't like because it means hiring more servers. That's why the ridiculously enormous beer glasses (20+ ounces) are so common.

Good for the profitability of the bar, but you end up drinking half of it warm.

Any experienced Stein drinker will attest that the solution is to drink it at the same pace as you would a smaller beverage receptacle.

Down in one?

More frequent attention is a solved problem: a server walks around with a tray of filled glasses and always replaces empty glasses, except if they are covered. That way, the communication overhead is reduced, and a roundtrip per table back to the bar is no longer required. With that, the number of servers can also be kept to an efficient minimum.

Obviously, this works only if a very small selection of beverages are served.

Back in college when I had a kegerator, we kept the large glass steins in the freezer. The problem with that is the beer would freeze slightly and you end up with little bits of ice floating in your beer. Plus your hands get cold, which is a bummer in the winter in Montana.

This calls for something a bit like the ridiculous fridge innovation: the butter warmer.

‘In this environment we are paying to cool, let’s have a warming element.’

Is this a thing? My quick search isn't showing anything like that, the closest is the butter container, which is designed to be a bit warmer than the rest of the fridge. There's no heat element involved though.

This seems to be a thing that has changed or is changing.

“Butter conditioners: These used to be a standard feature of New Zealand fridges, but they seem to have gone the way of the dinosaurs. We think that’s a good thing. Butter conditioners lower a fridge’s energy efficiency, and they don’t necessarily keep butter at a useful temperature anyway. If you want to keep butter a bit warmer, use the dairy compartment in the door.”

https://www.consumer.org.nz/products/fridges/guide

Huh, it seems to have mostly been a thing in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. That'd explain why I've never heard of it, in the US we only had the compartment.

"Nadir" is a pretty good name for a product that aims to minimize something!

Nominative determinism[1] strikes again!

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism

Might have missed this in the paper, but this is also the main reason some pilsner glasses are extremely basic. When the beer is warm, you drank it too slowly. A boerke (BE) or vaasje (NL) is an example: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaasje

Brazilians have a lot of techniques for always having the coldest beer. These are all things that are common among the population, even socially expected:

- Have a freezer specifically for beer in the home (kept at -2 to -3 celsius).

- Beer rarely comes in liter bottles (compared to neighboring countries at least), usually in cans of 330 to 500 ml. This minimizes the amount of beer you take out of the freezer at once.

- Once out of the freezer, the container is put in an insulating sleeve (this is very, very common).

- Several people are served at the same time from the same small container, into small drinking glasses such as the one shown in the picture. Drinking straight from the can is also common, but remember, cans have insulating sleeves.

All of these strategies ensures that the time that the beer has spent warming up before you drink it is minimized, without you having to worry too much about it (besides having to go many times to the freezer to fetch a new one, which is why the beer freezer is usually very close to the social area).

Brazilian beer is usually very weak (similar to American light beer, maybe even more so), and if drunk anything but very, very cold it's just disgusting. Brazilians will not accept beer that is not ice cold, unless the situation is really desperate.

The first time I visited Brazil, we gringos each ordered the large glass bottle of beer from a beach kioskue and drank from it. We quickly learned that was not the right way. The insulation sleeve and shared bottle is a much better way. It is more social too.

Saúde! (I don't drink anymore but cheers with my Brazilian coffee!)

A fraternity I rushed managed to execute a very similar strategy on a two-four of Natural Light.

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