Hogshead

What the unit was used for

The hogshead sat at a barrel and a half in the beer trade, 54 gallons, from the middle of the 15th century onwards.

A hogshead of wine was a different vessel entirely, 63 wine gallons and a quarter of a tun, which is about 52½ imperial gallons.

So the same word named two casks that differ by nearly a tenth, depending on whether the cellar held beer or wine.

William Harrison’s description of England, printed in Holinshed’s Chronicles in 1577, lists the wine casks as the hogshead of 63 gallons, the tierce of 84, the pipe or butt of 126 and the tun of 252.

The Weights and Measures Act 1824 swept the old wine and ale gallons away. From 1 January 1826, after a postponement, the imperial gallon was the only standard for wine, beer, ale and spirits alike, and the Act repealed the provisions of Queen Anne’s statute on the contents of the gallon, tun, butt, pipe and hogshead of wine.

From then on the beer hogshead was 54 imperial gallons, about 245 litres or 432 pints.

The Oxford Companion to Beer describes it as a delivery cask for pubs, in common use in the 18th and 19th centuries, which only very busy houses could empty within two or three days, and says that it is rarely seen today.

Like the barrel, the hogshead shows that cask names describe a trade first and a volume second.

In the system

1 beer hogshead = 1½ barrels = 3 kilderkins = 6 firkins; 1 wine hogshead = ¼ tun

A story you will often hear

The cask is named after a hog’s head, either for its shape or because the casks were branded with one.

What the evidence shows: Nobody knows. The word is recorded from the late 14th century, and the Online Etymology Dictionary can only suggest some resemblance or a mark once borne by the casks. Dutch, German and Swedish borrowed the cask as an ox-head instead, okshoofd, Oxhoft and oxhuvud, which no story about pigs explains.