Traditional Wine & Ale Measures
The two gallons England ran side by side before the 1824 unification.
For more than a century England measured wine and ale in different gallons. Wine ran to 231 cubic inches under the statute of 1707, ale to 282 under a Tudor standard, and the difference was deliberate: ale was the drink of ordinary people, and the larger measure meant more in the pot for the same penny. The Weights and Measures Act of 1824 abolished both in favour of a single imperial gallon, but the wine gallon had already crossed the Atlantic, which is why the American gallon remains smaller than the British one to this day.
The 1707 statutory measure for wine, and the direct ancestor of the modern US gallon.
Deliberately larger than the wine gallon, protecting the working drinker’s pennyworth.
Ten wine gallons, sized so one person could carry it. The cask of the Georgian smuggling trade.
The 1824 unification, defined as the volume of ten pounds of distilled water.
Eighteen wine gallons. A portable cask for moving mid-sized lots by cart.
Forty-two wine gallons, and the ancestor of the modern 42-gallon oil barrel.
The modern metric measure, for comparison.
The pint as it has stood since 1824, one eighth of an imperial gallon.
The dimension in which both historical gallons were legally defined.
The largest cask of all, and the origin of a ship’s tonnage.