Pipe

A pipe is nominally 105 imperial gallons — around 477 litres — although the figure varied by trade and by port, and a cider house that acquired one second-hand was buying a shape rather than a standard. The shape matters: a pipe is long and narrow where a hogshead is squat, which gives it a higher ratio of stave surface to volume and therefore more wood contact per litre of cider in it.

The reason they turn up in cider cellars at all is economic. Port and sherry shippers replaced casks on a cycle, and second-hand cooperage was cheap, sound and available in the west of England ports. Cider houses bought what the fortified trade discarded, which is why the vessel vocabulary of English cider — pipe, butt, hogshead — is largely borrowed and why a cask in a traditional cider cellar may have held something else for thirty years first.

That history is also a flavour history. A cask that arrived carrying residual fortified wine gave that character to its first few fills, and the practice of filling into ex-spirit and ex-fortified wood is continuous from necessity in the nineteenth century to deliberate choice now.