Glassblowing is almost choreographed.
If you don't move beautifully with the material,
you can't make beautiful glass. You can force it to become what you want it to be,
but it's going to capture those hesitations.
I'm a good dancer with glass.
For the first ten years of my career, I was a fulltime gallery artist.
Being fortunate enough to be successful was fantastic,
but it's very, very literally feast or famine.
I was in residency and I realized that to keep going, you're going to have to
do something besides sell the sculpture, which sells every few months.
There was a group of like six of us that were part of a bottle share club.
One of my friends leaned over to me and he was, like,
"Matthew, you should make us a beer glass!"
And I made the Hoppy Glass tailored to each person's handprint, literally cutting their handprint
out of the glass so that it fits like a glove.
I mean, this is fantastic. One of my friends was like
"This is pretentious as [BLEEP]! This is so pretentious."
I thought it was perfect.
And it's weird to think about how rewarding a $35 beer glass is versus a
$6,000 sculpture, but I can get those in people's hands. I can give people access to something
artistic and something creative, something well made, which is really, really hard with
a handmade craft.
The hard part about American Lager Glass is
making a glass that can elevate a beverage that we interact with on a daily basis.
There's so many different people that drink that beverage.
How do I approach designing something that
everyone's going to appreciate? It's one of the things that make my glassware very unique,
is thinking about how the beer drinker's going to interact with them, how it fits in their
hand, how it feels, what happens as their drinking it.
TIM: I think the vessels you serve food and drinks in are not only important because
the way they look, but they're also important about the way they make the food or the drink
taste. You know, when you pair up with somebody that can make any glass that you want, you
can have all these different shapes and vessels until you finally get the one that makes it
taste, smell, flow, carry – all at the same time – right and that's really cool.
I have huge respect for brewers. I mean that is a craft and an art form as well.
When we pour a lager into this glass, it has all of these undulations that feel
great in your hand. It's ergonomic. It feels fantastic. You see color variation in it.
It's almost like a Rothko painting when you fill it up and that's something where you pour
a beer into it and you stop and you look at it and you hold it up to the light and you're like,
"This is a gorgeous experience."
Sometimes I design something for the flavor profile and the experience at the same time.
It's like the Aromatic Glass with the mountain on the inside, that creates extra surface
tension. So it's a design element that looks beautiful, seeing this mountain emerging out
of beer, but while you're drinking it, it keeps the head maintained and it ensures that
you get a great aroma experience.
This one works for the hoppy beers
so I drink my hoppy beers out of this, and you know, the glassware makes a difference.
It intensifies the experience.
Well, it's a question I get asked a lot,
"how long does it take you make this?"
I tell them 10 years. 10,000 hours,
where you're sweating,
where you've cut yourself, and you're just repeating, practicing, practicing.
That's boring. That's not very sexy, but that's what it takes. After those ten years, you can make
it right every time within ten minutes.
Glassblowing was invented by the Romans in 50 B.C.
Same tools, same techniques, and it's a very unforgiving medium.
At best you have a 15 second window
between success and failure. If you're working on a piece for an hour, at 59 minutes -
you can make a mistake and the piece dies, the piece breaks and it's gone.
You can't fix it. You can't save it.
[GLASS BREAKING]
So the first step in glassblowing is melting glass.
Throw that in at about 50 pounds at a time.
The furnace that we have is about 350 pounds of glass.
For a batch to fine out and become a high quality glass,
it has to hit 2,350 degrees...crazy hot!
At this point, we grab the blowpipe and we're going to insert that into the furnace,
quickly turning it.
And this is gathering up molten glass.
We come out, we do some shaping and then we pop a
bubble into it.
It lets us create a wall that now we can
start shaping into a beer glass.
When you open the furnace door,
it is such an intense experience.
You either love it or you hate it. If you don't start to start to smile and
you don't walk towards it, then you're never going to be a glass artist.
I grew up in Albany, Kentucky, a farming town, one stop light.
Being an artist in rural Kentucky,
you just don't do that. I had no idea how I was going to make a living. I didn't even know if that
was possible, but I don't know what I am without glass, you know.
[TORCH FIRING]
We've been through a lot to get to where he is now,
and if everybody could do something they loved like that every single day,
I mean, the sacrifices are worth it. The fact that he didn't have any handouts
and built it literally all himself, I think, is going to be pretty impressive to Logan
when he gets older and can understand it.
I love glass. I am still just as captivated now as I was, maybe more captivated because
finally after 15 years of working with the material, there's freedom. I have no interest
in doing anything else until I die.