Tag: barware

Fall Highlights for Celebrating this Season

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As the holiday entertaining days approach, Simon Pearce designed a variety of new items to enhance good times with family and friends. With the popularity of the recently launched Shoreham whiskey glass; we extend the unique gesture of its curve into a complimentary decanter and double old-fashioned.  The decanter’s streamlined silhouette is a statement piece for any bar, and feels great in the hand when pouring and serving for celebratory times this season.

A wonderful new entertaining item is the Hampton chiller. Pursuing design concepts that are both functional and beautiful, we brought together hammered stainless steel and our glass to create a stunning combination.  The spherical glass shape can be filled with crushed ice, and the benefit of the 18/10 stainless insert is to keep your wine or champagne bottles chilled without them getting wet sitting in the ice. Separately, the metal component can be used as a tabletop sleeve like a coaster to place a bottle in, while the glass shape can double as an ice bucket or even a vase.

 

Exploring interesting material combinations is a hallmark of our design pursuits.  Expanding on our popular barware category,  we brought together a smooth sculpted wood handle with a stainless steel element to create a few quintessential bar tools.  As a great gift for the home bar user, we created a grey leather/suede pouch to conveniently put the tool set away when not in use. 

As our forest of glass evergreen trees keep growing, we explored other mediums that our unique tree design can be interpreted in.  After sculpting our trees as prototypes to be made out of beeswax which were launched last year as tree candles, we then took the same models to cast the trees in our own pottery.  Two options of glazes are available of a classic white dove, or the reactive green glaze called moss glen that has interesting tonal detail along its edges.  The new pottery evergreens make a great addition to any glass tree forest to create a striking decor statement.

We developed the technique of adding a watery swirl around a glass vessel first on a Waterbury tumbler and then a lamp.  To add a touch of expressiveness and swirl to our wine glass collections, we brought this concept into a classic red and white wine glass shape.  Each Waterbury glass is entirely unique resulting from a small gather of molten glass added on the glass floor while the vessel is being formed.

Our perfectly imperfect form and edge treatment of the Burlington Hurricane shows off the unique characteristics of our glass.  This year, it has been interpreted into two new sizes.  The new small and large sizes combined with the medium are great as a grouping in clusters of all three items on a table, console or mantel.  Perfect for illuminating a holiday table for gathering.

The New Woodbury Bourbon Glass

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Take a break from the summer heat of July, with a wonderful chilled cocktail in the Woodbury Bourbon glass. We recently extended the infamous Woodbury collection with this smaller cousin of the Woodbury Double Old Fashioned. The barware design characteristics are distinctly different from most other lines with the hallmark chilled textures, round to square detail and the heavy base. This bourbon glass is the perfect size for sipping bourbon, enjoying a mixed cocktail or simply as a juice glass. It was originally drawn up while traveling in Paris where Simon and Jay Benson started brainstormed new ideas for drinking glasses.

Woodbury Bourbon Glass

The Blackberry Bourbon Sour; featured at our restaurant, and you can try it at home with this recipe:

In a cocktail shaker with ice:

1 ½ oz. Bullet Bourbon

1 oz. lemon simple

¼ oz blackberry puree 

Shake and pour into an Woodbury Bourbon glass. 

Initial Sketch
Gather of Glass
Lutetia Bar
Rendering
Final Woodbury Bourbon
Glassblowing Process

Visit the Mill

Make the Simon Pearce Mill a summer destination and see where we make many of our barware and stemware items.

Taste that Stands the Test of Time

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We take crafting glasses seriously at Simon Pearce; and our focus is matched with all the great crafted breweries in the state of Vermont.

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Each year we design new concepts that we add to our line of barware, to keep up with the evolution of beer making and tasting. Our silhouettes are carefully formed with the finesse of our glassblowers.

In addition to many iconic beer glasses, some of our stemmed lines that are geared towards wine actually make great beer glasses.

Mick Maguire, our head of technology at Simon Pearce has lent his expertise in brews and tested many of our glasses to find some perfect pairings. He has experimented with prototypes of our new Vintner pulled-stem line, and discovered that they lend themselves perfectly to particular types of beer.

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“The form of any vessel effects the drinking experience, not just in a tactile manner. An angular body where the base is wider than the neck will have the effect of concentrating the aroma of the beer helping your nose appreciate the full spectrum of the flavor and will also help preserve the head. This is particularly pronounced with ‘bigger’ beers like bourbon barrel aged stouts and double IPA where it will really bring out the white oak of one and citrus of the other. This means that our Vintner line has ideal candidates for truly appreciating the flavor and nuance of complex craft brews. The Snifter will easily hold a full pour and sits very pleasingly in the hand.”

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“For a lighter beer such as a Kolsh or Pilsner, the flute shape of the Ascutney Pint, or the Norwich tall beaker, lend a traditional German feel which brings out the brightness of these nicely.”

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“But my go to everyday summer beer glass is the Woodstock Balloon, perfect for sitting round a campfire, it’s robust design makes it very durable and pleasantly weighty,  while at the same time it’s oversized bowl allows the nose to enter the glass as you drink, giving a truly full sensory experience.”

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“The bottom line is any beverage that has care put into its creation, will taste better in one of our handcrafted glasses, I’d encourage everybody to experiment to see the differences brought about by form, regardless of how a glass is labelled.” -M. Maguire

You can try our glasses out with great beer served at our bar in the Mill.  Visit us and experience the difference handcrafted glass makes.

 

The Ludlow Collection

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The Ludlow Collection
Simon Pearce Ludlow Collection

 

Simon Pearce is about revealing the inherent beauty of the glass…and handcrafting it to a natural outcome. As a counterpoint to mass production and mechanized perfection, we make things with time-honored traditional methods.

Glass and wood have had a long standing relationship from the ancient technique of using wooden mould to form the glass designs. The wood moulds don’t last forever, and we typically only get between 50-200 items from a mould, so we recreate them constantly. We do this all in-house, and behind the scenes a lot of our tooling is made In our own shop. I was inspired to bring the wood and glass back together as a final design, and explored their relationship in forms.

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Simon and I refined the shapes that would best compliment each other in glass and wood. The design process took about three months using geometry and proper proportions as the guiding direction. Some of the forms were mocked up in alternative materials like foam before going to a prototyping stage….we then worked with the moulds department to make the first samples. We then spent about 6-8 weeks perfecting the items.

 

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Simon Pearce Ludlow Whiskey Glass Set

 

Walnut was chosen because of the richness in grain, and the beautiful tonality of this hard wood. The mid tone of the walnut also contrasts nicely with our brilliant glass. The ludlow collection now has about 12 items, all built to last, with handcrafted excellence. A recent addition to the line is the signature pitcher with the same modern profile as the whole collection. A great addition to any home, the Ludlow items are geared towards casual entertaining for gatherings and celebrations with family and friends.

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