What's the point of the lid on the beer stein? Improve this question. Quuxplusone 2 2 silver badges 10 10 bronze badges. It may have been used to avoid being poisoned as well. I think Fishtaster has it about right, but I'd add that just as many modern men like their gadgets, there's a lot of evidence e. A great tankard with a lid was a toy that a man could show off in front of his friends with and that added a bit of fun to his beer drinking. I think it still is.
When I lived in Germany, if you were in a pub that had these type of steins and you left the lid down it was a sign you needed a new beer. There weren't many pubs like this anymore even when I lived there in the 80s — farmersteve. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Today they're largely just traditional. However, originally they helped: To keep the beer cool by preventing airflow from above.
To keep insects and other contaminants out. To prevent spillage while cheers-ing and generally carousing. Improve this answer. Fishtoaster Fishtoaster 4, 2 2 gold badges 19 19 silver badges 49 49 bronze badges.
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CSRF token. Currency change. Customer-specific caching. Individual prices. PayPal payments. Selected shop. Comfort functions. These cookies are used to make the shopping experience even more appealing, for example for the recognition of the visitor. Affiliate program. Google Tag Manager. Although no records of it exist, the Pewter Guild was no doubt an important sponsor of the covered-container law that prompted creation of the beer stein.
The Black Death, by depleting the population, had created a surplus of food, especially grains. Much of this surplus grain made its way into local beers, making a fine, pure beverage really worthy of celebration.
Eventually, large quantities of surplus grains made their way to the breweries in the north. There were only a few cloister brewers in the south at that time. In the s, Hamburg had breweries, producing 25 million liters of beer and directly or indirectly employing half of the population of that city.
Initially, a few glass bottles were made in Delft to be used for shipping some of that northern beer. But soon the fine clay of the Cologne area was used to make large stoneware jugs. The shipping industry was rejuvenated, and the beer export and stein-making businesses boomed, producing some extremely wealthy merchants. It was a war fought with fire. Virtually all of the northern breweries were destroyed, and most of the southern vineyards as well.
Beer soon replaced cider and wine as the beverage of choice throughout Germany. Pewter, silver, and glass luxury steins were also available, but the Chinese connection for the luxurious Ming porcelain mugs had been disrupted by rebellions in China in the middle s.
Faience is earthenware with a porcelain-like white glaze made from tin oxide. German faience was not as durable as the Chinese porcelain, but it was far less expensive and had two aesthetic advantages. First, the motifs on German faience were popular late-Renaissance and early-Baroque designs, not foreign-looking Chinese figures.
And second, the cobalt oxide of China was contaminated with purple manganese oxide, and the Persian cobalt oxide that the Chinese artists sparingly mixed in would often diffuse badly. The purer German cobalt oxide supplies were bright blue and allowed for crisp lines. So by the time the Chinese porcelain supply was re-established, German faience had gained a firm hold on the stein market.
It seems certain that this involvement was responsible for keeping the lidded design of the stein from disappearing since there has always been a tendency to return to beakers and a master stein, or to find some other way of getting around the expense of an individually hinged lid. Yet by the end of the s, when the covered-container law was apparently no longer in force, over years of conditioning had taught Germans to view a stein as incomplete without a lid. Thus, steins with lids are here to stay.
Many of the trends that were in place just before continued to strengthen thereafter. For example, by there were over breweries in Bavaria. And the art and production of stoneware and faience steins increased substantially, all the way into the late s. European porcelain was invented in but did not begin to have a noticeable impact on stein making until the s. Several porcelain factories were started in the s, but their products were very expensive. Only the wealthiest Germans were drinking beer from porcelain or glass vessels at that time.
Besides offering taste and fellowship, beer was considered to be important for the constitution, with the ability to induce strength, health, and relaxation. Although glass beer beakers were used in Roman times, the Church viewed glassmaking as heathenish and suppressed its production during the Middle Ages.
The art of making and enameling glass was not relearned by the Germans until the late s. These early enameled items were mainly beakers and pokals.
A few engraved glass steins began to be used in the s. However, partly because of their fragility and partly because their costliness limited the number produced, not many of these early glass steins still exist.
Beer Stein Sizes Metric volume is the most common method of sizing a beer stein; one metric liter is History of the Beer Stein Lid As briefly mentioned in the opening section, after the 14th century, as a reaction to the plague, there was a law established in Germany that required any beverage containers to be covered for sanitary purposes.
Types of Beer Stein Material There are many different kinds of beer steins made these days. Pewter Pewter is a compound consisting of tin, copper, and antimony.
Crystal Crystal is a clear, high-quality glass. Glass Glass is the least expensive of the most popular material used. Ceramic Ceramic steins fall into one of five categories according to the quality of the ceramic mass, raw materials, firing temperature, color, and density of the mass. This is a white earthenware with a lead glaze. These ingredients produce a white, more or less translucent, glass-like material. Ceramic Stein Decorations There are a few different techniques used to decorate the body of a ceramic stein.
Raised relief — This three-dimensional technique is easily the most popular. A highly detailed decorative area is raised above the background of the stein. Transfer decoration or decal decoration. The least expensive of the decorations. Because of modern technology, we can now produce great details of portraits, paintings, and photography that gets transferred onto the stein quite easily. Incised decoration or etched-decoration. This is a more complex and expensive technique, so it is not as popular.
The subject outline of the stein is etched by hand into the body. Like drinking and want to upgrade you walls? Click here to create your masterpiece in 3 easy steps Random Drink Generator.
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