Glossary · Equipment
Firkin
Definition
A small cask, conventionally a quarter of a barrel and nine imperial gallons in the British beer trade. Firkins and pins are the sizes in which traditional draught cider commonly reaches a bar.
- Subject
- Equipment
Related terms
Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.
Equipment
Kilderkin
A cask of half a barrel — eighteen imperial gallons in the British beer trade — between a firkin and a barrel in size.
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.
Cider
Draught cider
Cider dispensed from a cask, keg or box rather than from a bottle or can. In British usage it also implies a serving format eligible for the reduced draught rate of alcohol duty.
Serving
Gravity dispense
Serving cider from a tap in the cask or box by gravity alone, without pump or applied gas. It is the traditional method for still farmhouse cider and the standard at cider festivals.
Equipment
Shive
The wooden or plastic plug driven into the bung hole on the belly of a cask, carrying a smaller central section through which a spile can be pushed to vent gas.
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.
CAMRA cider and perry standards
Campaign for Real Ale · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Opened on 2026-08-24. Registered for the consumer-campaigning vocabulary — "real cider", "full juice" — which is advocacy language rather than legal definition, and is recorded as such wherever CiderHQ uses it.
Hereford Museum of Cider collections and interpretation
Hereford Cider Museum Trust · museum · retrieved 2026-08-24