I’ve been using Bodum Pavina double-walled glasses for a number of years now. Actually, we sold these way back with Flying Five Coffee, so that means I’ve been using them since at least 2007/2008. I think these glasses are great, and not just because they look cool.
They’re hand-blown double-walled borosilicate glass. The obvious advantage of the double-walled glass is that it insulates the hot coffee from your hand. While this is a fantastic feature, I think there’s another more interesting advantage to this: you can control how the coffee cools.
One of the many things I love about drinking single origin coffees is how the flavor changes as the coffee cools down. With a “normal” cup, this is a passive journey. With the double-walled glasses, you can control the cooling somewhat. What I like to do is to blow across the top to cool the coffee and taste as I go. When I find a taste that I’m particularly enjoying, I’ll stop and pause for a while, and the insulating double-walled glass lets me linger on that taste for a while. Then, I’ll go find another one.
Not to say that a passive journey in a normal cup isn’t a good thing – I enjoy that too. It’s just that it’s also fun to be able to control it and linger on interesting tastes.
Even before I found these glasses, I’ve always gone out of my way to drink coffee out of glass glasses. Call me crazy, but I just think coffee and espresso just taste better out of glass. It’s well accepted that coffee tastes better when you don’t put it in a to-go cup but drink it in a porcelain cup at the coffee shop. For me, it’s the same sort of analogy: I can’t exactly say why, but for me coffee in a glass just tastes better.
Finally, the hand-blown glass just looks and feels cool. Bodum did a really nice job with the Pavina glasses. It’s somewhat magical to see your coffee hovering above the “bottom” of the glass, and it’s always fun to watch the coffee brewing into the cup. The insulating walls make it very comfortable to grip the glasses without a handle, and the curve of the Pavina fits well in your hand.
Yes, they occasionally break: they’re glass. But, for me it’s worth it.
morgan.coffee 