Bottle or glass?
Warm or cold?
If you're drinking a good beer, or even a beer that just claims to be good, you can't really judge it fairly unless you pour it in a pint glass. I'm not really sure what the reason is for this, but many beers taste distinctly different in a bottle than in a glass, and the flavor in the bottle is generally worse. Some of the complexity of the beer's flavor seems to get lost, and whatever the strongest element is tends to get exaggerated even more. “Old Rasputin Imperial Stout,” for instance, has a far superior flavor in a pint glass than in the bottle, where it sometimes tastes too hoppy. “Obsidian” stout is the same way.
