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Does Your Beverage Match?
There’s a strange connection between the beverage you order and the glass it is served in. Particularly here, and particularly in pubs, which often hang the sign for a particular beer outside their door, the glass seems to mean a lot more than it might at first glance. In fact, if you look around at many of these places, you notice that not only does the glass match the beer, but so do the tablecloths, the coasters, the mirrors, the seat coverings, the menus, and sometimes even the lamp shades.Coca-Cola glasses are popular in the U.S., and you often get special cups at gas stations or fast food restaurants, but the practice reaches a completely new level in the ČR. Here, one finds glasses emblazoned with the brand logo of a wide range of beverages including beer, cappuccino, espresso, juice, chocolate, instant coffee, even hot cider.
I was going to post these observations a while back, but I never got around to it. In fact, my first idea was to make some sort of sweeping structural interpretation of all of this. Isn’t it obvious that it must reveal something about Czech society – perhaps an obsession with orderliness, identity, appropriateness and propriety, control, a certain feeling that form (i.e., your glass) must match content (i.e., your beverage)? Well, I suppose the list could go on. But there’s always the simple explanation that maybe they just had that glass handy, or they came free from the brewery. And there is never a guarantee that the glass actually contains what the logo on the outside claims.
Posted 09 November 2005 at 22:58.
A graduate student in music and anthropology writing a dissertation about music in Moravia, the eastern third of the Czech Republic. At some point, the Czech Republic's "second city" (that would be Brno) captured my attention, and I've since been blogging about events, arts, music, and other stuff—basically whatever interests me in and around the cityscape. I'm not living in Brno now, but I keep up with the cultural pulse from afar as best I can.
Comments:
Hi. Did I get it right? You found place that serves hot cider in Brno?
Is it the "hard" (alcoholic) cider? Like the one that's almost everywhere around GB/Baltics/Scandinavia... except CZ.
And about the pub and restaurant branding. Seems to me like bussiness practice from suppliers. If the place wants to get resonable price for the commodity supplies like beer they have to sign contract which includes branding everything.
4:38 PM, March 14, 2008
I think that hard cider is just making an appearance in the CR. I don't recall having it, but I think I was seeing a limited bit of advertising in late 2006. However, in this post I was referring to the hot cider of the apple juice variety. It used to be available at most coffee shops and cafes, along with a variety of other warmed fruit drinks. People often ordered them with rum or other alcoholic additives, too.
9:12 PM, March 14, 2008
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