Hogshead

A large traditional bulk shipping cask typically holding 54 gallons for wine and beer.

The hogshead is the most confusing cask in the English language, because at least four different vessels share the name. The traditional wine and beer hogshead holds 54 imperial gallons, one and a half barrels. A whisky hogshead holds around 250 litres and is a different object entirely, rebuilt in Scotland from dismantled American bourbon barrels with new ends fitted. A pilchard hogshead was an export cask of pressed fish that acquired a weight as well as a volume, at 448 pounds net. And a tobacco hogshead in colonial Virginia was larger again. The name’s origin is genuinely unknown: it appears in English from the fourteenth century and the various suggestions involving actual hogs are folk etymology. What is certain is the size: large enough to make bulk shipping economic, small enough that two dockers could roll it up a plank, which is the constraint that set almost every cask dimension in the trade.