Hogshead

Hey, check this out. You’re never gonna believe this. Way back in the late 80s, the first summer after I turned 21, me and my buddy Tank knocked down a hogshead of beer during that July and August and then we –

Wait.

You mean, you never heard of a hogshead?

Oh, yeah. Good point.

Well, it’s a unit of liquid measure.

Here, let me quickly explain.

There’s 8 pints in a gallon, right? And in each pint there’s 8 fluid ounces. So that makes 64 ounces to the gallon. A typical can or bottle of beer has 12 ounces, so you could pour a little more than five of those babies into a gallon container. More precisely, 16 beers for every 3 gallons. Perfect and beautiful.

8 gallons makes what is known as a firkin. A firkin therefore holds 42 and two-thirds cans of beer. Not a bad haul. For example, when I was living with my two chums renting a house down by the NJ Turnpike, we’d put away a firkin of Molson a weekend. A slow weekend, that is.

2 firkins make a kilderkin. For those keeping score, that’d be 85 and a third cans of suds. Back in the day we’d put that away, minimum, on a serious party weekend.

2 kilderkins make a barrel. You all have heard of a barrel of beer, right? That song you used to sing on long car rides as a kid? Doubling our kilderkin statistic, we find you can pump 170 cans of beer (plus a bonus two-thirds of a can) out of a barrel.

Finally, the hogshead. One-and-a-half barrels make a hogshead. (Pause while I consult my scratch pad …) Ergo, hence, thusly, QED, 255 and one-half cans of beer is the equivalent yield of a hogshead of brewskies.

That’s ten cases of beer, with two six packs and a 40-ounce left over.

So, me and Tank each drank a little over five cases of beer in those two months.

Now before you go all nancy-boy on me, that averages to only 16 beers a weekend. Which isn’t much, especially for a strong, healthy 21-year-old man. Just ask any of my twenty-something cousins. And it’s not like it causes any long-term brain damage, right?

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Uh … where was I going with this?

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Note 1: All the information in this post I gleaned from the writings of the legendary Dr. Isaac Asimov, who wrote a couple hogshead’s worth of books on just about everything under the sun during his long, prolific life.

Note 2: By my calculations (which may not be correct in the sense that they are right), a hogshead of beer will fit neatly into your average sized bathtub.