The Elegant, Affordable Teku Glass Makes Most Beer Taste Better

The Teku is a glass beloved by many beer connoisseurs, but from a practical standpoint, one major benefit is that it’s versatile. Instead of shelves full of glassware in all shapes and sizes, all a beer lover really needs is a set of Teku glasses.

“The Teku offers this one-size-fits-all model for beer glassware,” said Joshua Bernstein, who has written about beer for Bon Appétit, Saveur, and The New York Times, and has published five books about beer. “It goes with everything from a nice, crisp pilsner to a funky sour ale, and it will be able to handle all of that with depth and style and grace.”

Latiesha Cook, co-founder and CEO of Beer Kulture, a nonprofit aimed at fostering inclusivity and diversity in the craft-beer community, noted that Teku glasses are her “absolute favorite” way to enjoy beer. “I'm going to be so bold as to say that we can drink all beers from a Teku glass,” she said. “And that isn’t the case for most other glassware…. For example, you wouldn’t want to drink something really high in alcohol, like a barrel-aged beer, in [a large vessel like] a pint glass. But it would be perfectly fine in a Teku.”

Jenny Pfäfflin, an advanced cicerone (the beer equivalent of a sommelier) and exam manager for the Cicerone Certification Program, is known as the program’s “resident Teku guru.” She told us: “I can’t think of anything I wouldn’t put in it. It’s a very utilitarian glass.”

Another part of the appeal is that the Teku is just a nice glass to drink from, and it can help amplify the aroma of the beer you’re drinking. As Pfäfflin noted, the Teku’s delicate lip feels better to drink from than that of a thicker glass, and its long stem helps you avoid warming the beer with your hand as you drink.

The tulip shape of the Teku is designed to allow a foamy head to form, which releases aroma compounds that enhance the flavor. And because of the way the Teku’s lip bevels out at the top, Pfäfflin said, “it’s almost forcing you to put your nose in that beer before you take a sip.”

Cook added that the Teku’s small opening effectively “traps” those aroma compounds. “The taste is better because you can smell everything that’s happening right at the top of the glass. If I’m drinking a stout, for example, I might be able to smell coffee or toffee or chocolate. It just enhances the experience that you get,” she said.

All that said—and as we found in our own tests—most people probably won’t be able to detect significantly more flavors and aromas when they drink a beer out of a Teku compared with other glassware. It takes years of experience and training to develop that much nuance in your senses of smell and taste. But you might notice some subtle improvements while appreciating the other benefits of the glass, such as its versatility and good looks.

Manufactured by Rastal, a European glassware company, the Teku glass has garnered a cult following among beer enthusiasts since its introduction in 2006. Teku is a portmanteau of the names of Teo Musso and Lorenzo “Kuaska” Dabove, two Italian beer experts who collaborated on the glass’s design.

Mark Verling, beverage director at Tørst—an upscale beer bar in Brooklyn, New York—knows Musso from his many years in the industry, and Verling said the Teku glass came about when Musso set out to create “the beer equivalent of a wine glass.”

“His whole vision was to have beer be as elevated as wine in a restaurant setting,” Verling said. “He would go to these beautiful, fine-dining establishments in Italy and people would order fabulous bottles of wine—but beer was never part of the conversation.”

Although the dialogue has largely shifted over the past decade, some people still lament the wine-ification of beer. But, according to Verling, the Teku glass offers “a way to fully appreciate the beverage, because it’s a really sophisticated beverage.” He continued, “A lot of the beers we drink take years to make.”

That has changed in Europe and in big US cities. However, as Bernstein noted, the idea that great beer deserves great glassware—which has long been the norm elsewhere—has been slower to take hold in the US more broadly.

“In Belgium and other countries, they have always treated nice glassware and beer as two things that go hand in hand,” he explained. “But for a long time, in America,” he said, “you would see a shaker pint at every bar, whether it was a dive bar or a nicer beer bar.”

Shaker pints were (and, to some extent, still are) ubiquitous because they’re sturdy, easy to clean, and designed to be stacked without breaking. But they aren’t great for drinking beer, Bernstein said, and in fact “they’re designed for shaking drinks; hence the ‘shaker’ pint.”

For many Americans, Bernstein said, beer is still considered lowbrow: “It’s what you drink at a barbecue or while you’re mowing your lawn.” But he noted that the Teku has helped more people realize that “beer can be as complex and delicious as any other beverage in the world.”

With all of that in mind, we wanted to test how much of a difference the Teku glass made in our own beer-drinking experiences. We hosted a casual tasting at our office in Long Island City, New York. Spanning a wide range of beer-drinking experience levels, the panel included writers from several teams, our senior photo editor, the editor of our kitchen section, former staffer and New York City beer-tour guide Orr Shtuhl, and Laszlo Fodor, who co-owns Focal Point Beer Company—conveniently located across the street from the office.

We tried an assortment of beer styles, and they were served in a variety of glassware: an IPA glass, a tulip-shaped glass, an imperial pint glass, a weizen (wheat beer) glass, a plastic Solo cup, a Libbey Signature Kentfield Estate All-Purpose wine glass, a Teku glass with laser-etched nucleation points (small indents that encourage a steady stream of carbonation bubbles to form), and a standard Teku glass.

Most tasters agreed that the various beers had a muted flavor and almost no aroma when sipped from a Solo cup or an imperial pint glass, compared with beer served in the more curvaceous glassware—the IPA, tulip-shaped, weizen, wine, and Teku glasses—which seemed to foster more vibrant flavor profiles. Beyond that, we didn’t perceive any earth-shaking differences; an IPA tasted just as grassy and refreshing in a traditional IPA glass as it did in either of the Teku variations or even a wine glass.

The taste of beer from the Teku with nucleation points was also, to our palates, indistinguishable from the taste of beer served in a regular Teku glass.

A Teku glass won’t turn you into a cicerone overnight, just as a nice pair of sneakers won’t run a marathon for you. But a Teku glass is a beautiful, well-made vessel that gives beer its due.

The current version of this article was edited by Rachelle Bergstein and Marguerite Preston.