How to store glasses on a bar cart

Glassware is the part of a bar cart most likely to break and the part most likely to end up back in a kitchen cupboard. Both problems are solved by the same thing: matching how you store the glasses to the shelf gap the cart actually has.

The three methods

1. Upright on a shelf

The default, and the best one if the gap allows it. Glasses stand as designed, nothing collects in the bowl, and you can pick one up one-handed.

The constraint is height. A 12 oz rocks glass at about 4 1/8 inches stands under any gap. A Libbey Embassy coupe at 4 1/2 inches does too. A Riedel Veritas at 6.69 inches needs a gap over about 8 inches to lift out without tilting, which a three-tier cart may not have.

2. Stem holders, upside down

Rails that hold stemware by the foot, hanging under a shelf. They use dead vertical space, they look excellent, and they are built into several carts in our library including the VASAGLE gold range.

The problem nobody mentions: an upside-down glass collects dust in the bowl. It is inverted, so the dust settles into the part you drink from and stays there. Every glass needs rinsing before use, which is a small tax paid every single time.

The fix is straightforward: use stem holders for the glasses you use most often, so they never sit long enough to collect anything, and store the rest upright.

3. Stacked

Only rocks glasses, only if they are designed to stack, and only two high. Libbey makes a stackable rocks line specifically for this. Non-stacking glasses wedge, and separating two wedged glasses is how people cut their hands.

The shelf-gap arithmetic

Almost no cart publishes shelf gap, but you can derive it. A 33 inch cart with roughly 27 inches of usable vertical space gives about 13 inches per gap with two shelves and about 8.5 with three.

Keeping glasses from breaking

• Back half of the shelf. Glassware at the front edge of a wheeled object is glassware that will eventually be knocked.
• Not above the bottles. Reaching over a row of bottles to retrieve a glass is the movement that knocks bottles over.
• Lift the cart over thresholds. A loaded cart pushed over a door lip applies a shock load well above its static rating, and glassware is what moves first. See the capacity guide.
• Buy replaceable glasses. Foodservice lines can be replaced one at a time; a boxed set of four cannot.

How many to keep on the cart

Eight — four of two shapes. That is enough for four people to have two drinks, and it is about what a shelf holds alongside anything else. The rest of the glassware belongs in a cupboard; a cart holding twelve glasses is a rack, and the visual argument for that is in how to style a bar cart. Shapes and heights are compared in the glassware roundup.