Best rocks glasses

This is the single most common mismatch in a home bar, and it happens because glassware is usually bought before the ice is upgraded. A 2-inch cube in a 9oz rocks glass leaves very little room, and a 60mm sphere is worse - by the time you have covered it with a double pour you are at the rim.

If you have already bought a clear ice mold, buy 12oz glasses. If you have already bought 9oz glasses, that is a good argument for a cube mold over a sphere mold - see best clear ice molds.

These are selections on published specification, glass composition and construction rather than test results. We weighted:

• Capacity against realistic ice. The rows in the table above. A glass that cannot take the ice you make is the wrong glass regardless of how it looks.
• Rim treatment. Laser-cut rims are thinner and far more chip-resistant than rolled rims. Rims are where glasses die.
• Wall thickness. Thin walls feel better on the lip; thick walls hold temperature longer. There is a real trade-off and it depends on your drink.
• Base weight. A heavy base is stable on a bar cart and pleasant in the hand.
• Replaceability. A glass you can buy one of in three years is worth more than a discontinued set of four.

Our method, including what we deliberately do not claim, is on how we pick.

A thin-walled glass is more pleasant on the lip and shows the drink better. A thick-walled one has thermal mass, which means a chilled glass stays cold longer and a room-temperature one takes longer to warm the drink.

For a drink over a large ice cube, wall thickness barely matters - the ice is doing the temperature work and it has vastly more thermal mass than the glass. For a neat pour with no ice, thicker walls genuinely help keep your hand's heat out of the spirit.

That is the argument that leads people to double-walled glasses like the Norlan, which take the idea to its conclusion: your hand touches an outer wall that is not in contact with the spirit at all. It is a real effect and it is only relevant when there is no ice in the glass.

Glasses almost never break in a spectacular way. They acquire a small chip on the rim, which makes them unpleasant to drink from and eventually unsafe, and then they get thrown out. The rim is the wear surface.

A rolled rim - where the glass is folded over to thicken and strengthen the edge - is the cheap way to make a rim durable. It works, and it gives you a noticeably thick lip. A laser-cut rim is sheared cleanly and left thin, which feels much better and, counterintuitively, resists chipping better in a dishwasher because there is no thickened bead to catch.

If you run glasses through a dishwasher - most people do - a laser-cut rim is worth seeking out specifically. It is also the single specification most likely to be absent from a cheap set.

Four is the minimum that survives contact with reality: two in use, one in the dishwasher, one spare. Six is the number that lets you have people over without washing mid-evening. Eight is the number at which you stop thinking about it.

Buy a glass that is sold in ongoing production rather than as a one-off set, so you can replace a broken one without replacing the set. That is a genuine advantage of a large maker's staple line over a boutique set, and it is why the Libbey lines appear twice on this page.

If you want one special pair as well, buy them separately and treat them as the pair you hand-wash. That is a much better outcome than eight expensive glasses you are nervous about.