hogshead

A hogshead is a large cask of liquid (less often, of a food commodity). More specifically, it refers to a specified volume, measured in Imperial units, primarily applied to alcoholic beverages such as wine, ale, or cider.

A tobacco hogshead was used in (American) colonial times to transport and store tobacco. It was a very large wooden barrel. A standardized hogshead measured 48 inches long and 30 inches in diameter at the head. Fully packed with tobacco, it weighed about 1000 pounds.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) notes that the hogshead was first standardized by an act of Parliament in 1423, though the standards continued to vary by locality and content. For example, the OED cites an 1897 edition of Whitaker's Almanack, which specified the number of gallons of wine in a hogshead varying by type of wine: claret 46 gallons, port 57, sherry 54; and Madeira 46. The American Heritage Dictionary claims that a hogshead can consist of anything from 62.5 to 140 (presumably U.S.) gallons.

Eventually, a hogshead of wine came to be 63 gallons, while a hogshead of beer or ale is 54 gallons.

A hogshead was also used as unit of measurement for sugar in Louisiana for most of the 19th century. Plantations were listed in sugar schedules as having produced x number of hogsheads of sugar or molasses.

Popular culture and trivia

• In the episode of The Simpsons titled ‘A Star Is Burns’, Grampa Simpson uttered: “The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!” That translates into about 12 (beer) or 10 ½ (wine) feet per gallon, or about 1.2 litres per metre! (Even NASA's massive crawler-transporter is about three times as efficient.)
• In Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huckleberry Finn hides out in a sugar-hogshead, a large barrel used for storing sugar.
• In the Harry Potter book series, the town of Hogsmeade contains a pub named the Hog's Head, a wordplay on this measurement.
• The Beatles song Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite contains the line, “Over men and horses, hoops and garters and lastly through a hogshead of real fire”
• The opening number in The Music Man contains the lines, “Cash for the noggins and the piggins and the firkins/Cash for the hogshead, cask and demijohn”, and later: “Gone with the hogshead cask and demijohn,/gone with the sugar barrel, pickle barrel, milk pan,/gone with the tub and the pail and the tierce.”

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