Bar and Drink Emoji, Copy and Paste

The bar set, and when each one arrived

The core glassware came in two waves. Wine Glass U+1F377, Cocktail Glass U+1F378, Tropical Drink U+1F379, Beer Mug U+1F37A, Clinking Beer Mugs U+1F37B and Sake Bottle And Cup U+1F376 all came from the Japanese carrier sets absorbed into Unicode 6.0 in 2010, which is why the sake set exists and a shot glass does not. Bottle With Popping Cork U+1F37E followed in Unicode 8.0. Clinking Glasses U+1F942 and Tumbler Glass U+1F943 arrived in Unicode 9.0, adding a champagne toast and a spirits glass to a set that until then could only offer beer. Ice Cube U+1F9CA came later still, and Pouring Liquid U+1FAD7 later again.

What is missing, and what people use instead

There is no beer bottle, no wine bottle, no shot glass, no coupe, no highball and no espresso cup. The set covers vessels that a Japanese phone carrier drew in the 2000s plus a handful of later additions, so the gaps are historical rather than deliberate. Each gap has a standard workaround: the tumbler stands in for a shot, the popping cork stands in for any bottle, and pouring liquid covers the act rather than the container. The individual cases are worked through on beer bottle emoji, wine bottle emoji and shot emoji.

The same glass, drawn differently

• Beer Mug — a dimpled glass mug of amber beer with a head of foam almost everywhere. Google’s Android version once drew the foam floating clear of the beer, disconnected from the liquid, and redrew it after the bug became a running joke.
• Cocktail Glass — a martini-shaped glass on every platform, but the garnish is not fixed by the standard. Some vendors add an olive, some a cherry, some nothing, and the liquid color varies.
• Tumbler Glass — read universally as whiskey, though the official name says only tumbler. Some platforms include ice, some do not, and the liquid runs from pale gold to deep amber.
• Clinking Glasses — two champagne flutes, angled toward each other. The angle and the number of bubbles differ enough that the mark reads as a livelier toast on some platforms than others.
• Sake Bottle And Cup — a flask with one or more small cups. Several vendors print a character on the flask, which means the glyph carries Japanese text that most readers will not recognize as text.

What each one is actually used for

Register is the useful distinction. Clinking Beer Mugs is casual and celebratory, the standard sign-off on an invitation to the pub. Clinking Glasses is the formal version of the same gesture and shows up around weddings, promotions and new years. Wine Glass reads as dinner rather than a night out. Cocktail Glass reads as nightlife and, in bar and venue listings, as the bar itself. Bottle With Popping Cork is a result rather than a drink: people send it when something has been won. Hot Beverage is the odd one out, doing double duty as coffee and as a shorthand for gossip. The full breakdown is on drink emoji meanings, and the toast combinations are on cheers emoji copy and paste.

Caveats

• Screen readers announce the official Unicode name, so the tumbler is read as tumbler glass, not whiskey, and clinking beer mugs is read out in full every single time it appears.
• Each of these takes two units in the encoding most input fields count with, so a character-limited field will treat one glass as two.
• Handle and username fields usually strip them entirely; display names are more forgiving.
• There are no combined drink characters. Nothing joins a glass to a person the way some other emoji do, so a scene has to be built from separate characters placed in order.

Where the rest of the wing goes

Individual glasses get their own pages: beer, wine, champagne, cocktail, with prohibition-era recipe cards, whiskey and tropical drink. Hot drinks are not claimed here: coffee and tea live on coffee emoji, and water lives on water emoji. For a plain-text bar sign built without any emoji at all, see beer and cocktail ASCII art.