OT:Pub spirit measures

Paul

Are the Scottish measures not larger than the English ones?

Customarily, but the only measures now permitted are either 25ml or 35ml

- the pub must not mix them.

Owain

Not any more I believe, ?

This dates back to the days when English spirits were served in one sixth of a gill measures while in Scotland they used quarter gill measures (hence the Scottish 'half and half', a double whisky and a half pint beer chaser). Today pubs throughout the UK must serve in 25ml or 35ml measures (25ml is slightly more than a sixth of a gill).

Paul

Thanks for that, my education is now complete, I think not. ;-)

I often wondered where that came from - but I'm not sure why a double whisky is called a "half"?

Two quarter gill shots of whisky = half a gill :-)

Paul

In article , Paul Sherwin writes

Ah but that's a British gill not a Yorkshire gill which at least when I was a lad was half a pint not a quarter, now that would be a measure of Scotch :-)

Mike

Got it now (not too thick really!!!)- cheers, Paul!

How about Gaping Gill? You'd get a lot of pints in there :-)

Paul Sherwin18/12/06 17:16

When I was a kid a gill was a third of a pint - one 24th of an imperial gallon. School milk came in gill bottles. As I've read variously about the

The pint is a unit of volume or capacity. It is used mainly in the U.S., the UK and the Republic of Ireland. The value differs between countries, and when the contents are wet or dry:

As part of the metrication process, the pint in the UK and in Kenya is now only used as a measure for beer (see pint glass) and cider when sold by the glass (in public houses for instance) and milk (although milk is also sold in metric quantities). Many recipes published in the UK still provide ingredient quantities in imperial and metric, where the pint is often used as a unit for larger liquid quantities. Most new recipes are now published in metric only with the pint being rounded to 500 or 600 mL. Ireland has completed its metrication process and the pint is only used for serving beer, stout and cider.

The pint is defined as 1/8 of a gallon. Other versions of the gallon were defined for different commodities, and there were equally many versions of the pint!

America adopted the British wine gallon (defined in 1707 as 231 cubic inches) as its basic liquid measure, from which the U.S. wet pint is derived, and the British corn gallon (1/8 of a standard "Winchester" bushel of corn, or 268.8 cubic inches) as its dry measure, from which the U.S. dry pint is derived.

In 1824 the British Parliament replaced all its variant gallons with a new "imperial" gallon based on ten pounds of distilled water at 62 °F (277.42 cubic inches), from which the UK pint is derived.

The UK pint is officially defined as 0.56826125 litres exactly in The Units of Measurement Regulations 1995.

In Australia and New Zealand, a subtle change was made in 1-pint milk bottles during the conversion from Imperial to metric in the 1970s. The height and diameter of the milk bottle remained unchanged, so that existing equipment for handling and storing such bottles was unaffected, but the shape was subtly adjusted to increase the capacity from 568 mL to 600 mL - a nice, round, metric measure. Such milk bottles are no longer officially referred to as pints. The pint glass in pubs in Australia (which is so called) remains closer to the standard Imperial pint, at 570 mL.

Is that all a can of worms... or should I ask first how big a *can* is ?

CR