(FORTUNE Magazine) – We'd never chug cabernet from a bottle, but Americans think that it's different with beer. John Travolta, leaning languidly against the bar in Urban Cowboy, captured our odd romance with longnecks. If the bottle's Early Times, he's a derelict; if it's Bud, he's all-American.

I've never understood the bottle fetish, for reasons both aesthetic and practical. The enjoyment of beer, like the enjoyment of wine, depends on the nose. Anyone who's had a cold knows you don't taste much with a stuffy head.

But there's also the matter of appearance. Properly poured, beer is beautiful to behold. Its colors are among the richest in gastronomy, from the orange-apricot India pale ale to the shimmering gold pilsner to the deep-ebony stout.

Europeans take it for granted that different beers call for different glassware. In Germany and the Czech Republic, pilsner is served in the conical glass long familiar in American corner taverns. In Britain and Ireland, the sturdy pint glass suggests an ale's straightforward oomph. But no one takes it as far as the Belgians: wide-mouthed goblets, tulip-shaped bowls on a stem, tall flutes...Indeed, the story is told (in The Encyclopedia of Beer) of visitors to Belgian public houses asking for a particular beer only to find that all glassware for that style was in use. Perhaps something else?

In America, often as not, the patron who prefers his beer in a glass must ask for one. His bartender slides a nondescript jelly jar in his direction, like the afterthought it is.

My wife tells me I take these things too seriously. Beer's beer.

You would think that we were talking about barley pop. We are, of course, when it's the usual mass-market lager. If there's nothing to taste in the first place, why bother with niceties? But even beer has its connoisseurs, discerning but not truly difficult. We'd just like it in the right glass, please.

--MICHAEL SKUBE