Glossary · Equipment
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Definition
One of the largest traditional cask sizes, conventionally twice a hogshead. As with all historic cask names, the capacity varied by trade and period.
- Subject
- Equipment
Related terms
Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.
Equipment
Hogshead
A cask size long used for cider. Cask sizes were never fully standardised across trades and regions, and a cider hogshead was not necessarily the same volume as a beer or wine one.
Equipment
Pipe
A large elongated cask, associated chiefly with the fortified wine trade and used in cider houses that acquired their vessels second-hand from it.
Equipment
Cask
A wooden vessel of staves bound by hoops, bulging at the middle so it can be rolled and turned. Casks both store cider and shape it, admitting a slow ingress of oxygen through the wood.
Equipment
Kilderkin
A cask of half a barrel — eighteen imperial gallons in the British beer trade — between a firkin and a barrel in size.
Where to go next
- Cider glossary — The whole vocabulary, by subject and A–Z.
- Comparisons — Terms that are only really clear when set against the thing they are not.
- Search — Finds terms by their aliases and by their spellings in other languages.
Sources
What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.
Hereford Museum of Cider collections and interpretation
Hereford Cider Museum Trust · museum · retrieved 2026-08-24