A butt load of work

“I’d love to go out tonight, but I have butt load of homework to do!”

You might have heard this phrase many times and considered it to be scatological and a little rude, but the etymological origins of this phrase are quite innocent. A butt is a large cask used to store and transport beer/wine/ale …

A butt of beer is 108 Imperial gallons, which is a lot of beer. A big butt load to be precise (and that ain’t no lie). When some tells you that they have a butt load of work, they have a high volume of work.

Casks

Common vernacular is to use the term barrel to refer to any sealed (typically wooden) vessel in the characteristic shape but, strictly speaking, the correct word to use is cask. A barrel, just like a butt, is just the name of a particular size of cask. Here’s a graphic showing the relative sizes of a few casks.

And here is the data in tabular format. This is not supposed to be a complete list, it’s here just to show context of the different sizes of containers, their approximate relative sizes, and their colloquial names. (The more you delve into it, the more complicated it gets. For instance, from the mid 15th Century up until as late as 1803, in Britain, casks for ale differed in the number of gallons they held compared to casks for beer!)

Name	Litres	US Gallons	Imperial Gallons	Pints
Tun	982	254	216	1728
Gorda	700	185	154	1232
Madeira Drum	650	172	143	1144
Port Pipe	650	172	143	1144
Puncheon	500	132	110	880
Butt	491	127	108	864
Barrique (Cognac)	300	79	66	528
Barrique (Bordeaux)	225	59	49	392
Hogshead	225	59	49	392
British Barrel	164	43	36	288
American Standard Barrel	200	53	44	352
Tierce	160	42	35	280
Kilderkin	82	22	18	144
Rundlet	68	18	15	120
Quarter Cask	50	13	11	88
Blood Tub	40	11	9	72
Firkin	41	11	9	72
Pin	20.5	5	4.5	36
Minipin	10.25	2.5	2.25	18
Barracoon	4	1	0.9	7.2

Names

A few facts about some of the names:

A Tun is twice the size of a butt, and equal to six barrels.
A Gorda is used primarily by the American whiskey industry for maturation.
A Madeira Drum, as the name implies, is used in European wine production. They are short, fat, and dumpy in shape.
Port pipes have the same volume as Drums, but have the more typical shape.
Puncheons are also seen in two aspect ratios; a dumpy ‘Machine Puncheon’ and a ‘Sherry Shape Puncheon’.
A Hogshead is a re-purposed barrel. Five ex-bourbon standard barrels are broken down into their staves and then reassembled (with new larger end caps), into four, slightly larger, ‘hoggies’.
A (British) Brewery Barrel holds 288 pints (I hope you don’t think that ‘two gross’).
A Kildernkin is half a barrel (144 pints).
A Firkin is a quarter of a barrel (72 pints). The name ‘firkin’ comes from the Dutch word ‘vierdekijn’ meaning fourth; a fourth of a barrel.
A Pin is an eighth of barrel (36 pints).
A Minipin is half of this again, at 18 pints.

(If you really have an immense volume of work, rather than saying you have a 'butt load' of work, you can techincally say you have a 'tun of work' – being twice as much as a 'butt').

Wooden Casks

Casks are typically manufactured from white oak, and have been made since before Roman times. Traditionally constructed from staves bound by iron hoops, they bulge in the middle. There is a mathematic principle that describes the optimal shape for a cask, and the bulge in the middle has an additional feature in that it allows them to be easily rolled, and turned in place, by one person (even when full).

Cask are strong and can be stacked easily. White oak is used (compared to red oak, and other woods), and when quarter sawn and appropriately aged/seasoned, makes a water tight cask (other woods don't perform as well). Casks that will be used to mature spirits are charred and burned on the inside to caramelize the sugars/starches in the wood to impart flavours into the spirit.

Champage

Similar to casks, different sized bottles are used to store and distribute Champagne. You can read about the different sizes in this article.

Image: Premier Champagne

Image: Ian Mercer

Do you know the difference between a Magnum, Jereboam, and a Methuselah?