What is a Collins Glass?

When it comes to creating cocktails you’ll find many variable sizes and shapes to your glassware. One such elusive vessel is the Collins Glass, it’s used in many cocktail recipes but can be tough to find when shopping for glasses. If you head to Wal-Mart, Target or typical areas to get wine glasses and tumblers, you’re going to come up dry in the Collins department — I don’t know why.

Finding an old fashion glass, red wine glasses and typical highball glasses is easy compared to the Collins glassware. A Collins Glasses will be between 8 oz. to 14 oz. with a nice 12 oz. glass being a great target size. Cocktails look delightful and fancy in this glassware, from Long Island Ice Tea, Captain Hook, Carbonated Piston Slinger and, of course, the Tom Collins.

The glass is cylindrical and tall and may be frosted or clear. You’ll probably see them used in bars for exotic drinks and, sometimes, you’ll be served soda in a Collins Glass at a bar, pool hall or anywhere trying to impress the guests.

I tried hard to find a good Collins Glass made of firm glass instead of plastic cheap beverage vessels. Thus far, for the best place to find a reliable source of Collins Glasses, you’ll want to checkout Awesomedrinks.com. I tried Amazon first, but there are little to no Collins Glasses of quality that are in stock and relatively well priced.

[EDITORS UPDATE 6/23/2013] After purchasing collins classes a number of times from AwesomeDrinks and using them on our show Common Man Cocktails we affiliated with AwesomeDrinks. A few years later we offered to purchase the company and are now the proud owners of AwesomeDrinks.com! After the last comment it became clear that this older post needed an update so it didn’t look as if we were trying to “find” our own store and persuade people that we were not the current owners.