Catalogue no. BBG124
Glasses
Exhibit information
Glass style Flute A tall, narrow glass designed to showcase a beer's clarity and lively bubbles while helping retain its carbonation and foamy head.
Read in Explainer
Explainers
Capacity 33cl / 25cl
Manufactured 2024 Curator’s Notes A tall, elegant flute with rather more going on than its silhouette initially suggests. The gently flared bowl is marked for both 25 cl and 33 cl serves and descends into an unusually sculpted stem, giving an otherwise familiar glass shape a distinctive profile. On the front, a cartoon figure carries the horn-shaped drinking vessel for which La Corne beers are particularly well known.
The whimsical branding conceals a considerably darker story. La Corne du Bois des Pendus — approximately “The Horn of the Wood of the Hanged” — takes its name from a locality in the Anlier forest in the Belgian Ardennes. The Bois des Pendus is associated with events in 1636, when around a hundred local inhabitants are said to have been hanged there. The “horn” refers to the shape formed by the forest, while later folklore tells of a brewer named Cornelius and his hidden brewing recipe.
The beer's extraordinary horn-shaped serving glass turns that name into a physical object, and even this more conventional flute retains the joke: its cartoon figure is depicted carrying one. The result is another Brasserie des Légendes glass in which apparently playful decoration opens onto a much older piece of Belgian local history and folklore.
