This type of large beaker has been called a Humpen (a German word meaning a tankard but without a handle) since the seventeenth century but when this particular example was made in 1594, it would have been known as a Glas, Luntz or Willkomm. The name Willkomm (welcome) refers to the custom of presenting a guest on arrival with a drink in such a vessel. The guest was expected to drink the entire contents of the glass. Some Humpen could be as much as 60cms tall and might hold up to about four litres of beer, then as now a favourite German drink. Humpen were always held with both hands as they were so substantial and were often used for communal drinking. They were passed around for drinking toasts at banquets.

Enamelled decoration on glass remained popular for German forest (potash based) glass long after it had ceased to be fashionable for Venetian 'cristallo' (soda based glass). The colours are achieved through the use of different mineral oxides and they were fired on in order to fuse them to the glass. Two of the main glassmaking families who produced enamelled wares in the Ore Mountains region bordering Saxony and Bohemia in the late sixteenth century were the Schürers and Preusslers.

This glass, painted in 1594 with the double-headed imperial eagle, bearing at its breast the imperial orb and on its wings rows of armorial shields is known as a Reichsadlerhumpen (imperial eagle beaker). The stock design symbolises the union of the central European states under the Habsburg emperors and was used with little variation from about 1570 to 1740s. The eagle was shown either with a crucifix (mainly between 1570 and 1600) or an orb (mainly from 1585 onwards). The painting of this particular design was used as a compulsory exercise to test the skill of apprentice guild-masters. The formal image was based on literary and print sources from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and presented an idealised view of the structure of the Holy Roman Empire.