Kansas City Food Blog

​If you've ever received a short pour from a bartender or had a pint come to the table with the beer a full inch below the top of the glass, you know that it's hard to not be annoyed.

Well, now you can find out exactly how much you're missing, thanks to the Beer Gauge -- a piece of cardboard that rests next to the lip of a standard U.S. pint glass and shows you how many ounces of liquid are actually in the glass and what percentage you've been shorted.

The Beer Gauge inventor, an engineer named Chris Holloway, tells The Wall Street Journal that he doesn't think restaurants are trying to take advantage of customers but, rather, that there's a design flaw in the pint glass itself.

The real issue here is not that bartenders or bars are trying to rip us off, it's the poor design of a pint glass. If you want a full pint of beer, you have to have it filled to the very top.

Holloway notes that glasses in Europe are slightly larger than the amount of beer ordered, providing additional room for the head and allowing them to be carried without spilling.

But U.S. drinkers aren't the only ones worried by pints. A Canadian beer blog -- A Good Beer Blog -- notes that federal and provincial laws conflict over pouring regulations in British Columbia. Canadian law requires that a pint be 20 oz. while provincial law states that a draft beer can't be larger than 17.5 oz. The reality is apparently that pubs are serving 17 oz. "pints."

But A Good Beer Blog offers perhaps the best perspective to drinking beer.

We Canucks just measure consumption by the number of units, by how many beer [sic] we had last night -- not exactly how much.

[Image via Flickr: Rev Stan]