The mysteries of alcohol measurements

Pint, demi, jeroboam, magnum, US and Imperial gallons. The measurements of alcohol are very mysterious. In this boozy season, here are some of the secrets behind the glasses and bottles behind the bar.

Mathieu Perreault
Press

Pint

In Quebec as in England, the pints are 20 oz. Or 568 ml. But in France, they have half a liter, the metric system requires. And in the United States, they are 16 oz, or 473 ml. Canadian and American beer bottles are both 12 oz, but in the first case that’s 341 ml, and in the other 355 ml. It’s that the ounces are not the same here and at Uncle Sam’s.

Queen Anne’s gallon

Britain adopted the “imperial system” of measures in 1824, after the American Revolution. The United States therefore kept its previous measures, in particular the “Queen Anne’s gallon”, established in 1707 as part of a first attempt to systematize volumes. The imperial gallon, used in Canada, corresponds to 4.55 L, compared to 3.8 L for the American gallon. To complicate matters, there is 160 oz in an Imperial gallon, but only 128 oz in the US gallon. As in both cases 1 gallon is 8 pints, we come to 20 oz quarts in Canada and 16 oz in the United States.

Beer in France …

In France, beer volumes are metric… but not their names. A galopin corresponds to 125 ml and a half to 250 ml, while the pint has different names depending on the region (at least for tenants attached to traditions): genuine, serious, distinguished and mini-knight. The term baron sometimes means half a liter, sometimes a liter. The only non-metric measure is the pint, inherited from royalty and originally sourced from Germany, which is worth 568ml. In Germany, moreover, the one-liter glass, still commonly used in the South, is called “Mass”, or “measure” …

Anglo-Saxons

In the United States, beer bottles of different volumes have names as varied as tallboy (16 oz as the pint), stovepipe (19.2 oz) and bomber (22 oz).

Wine

The standard bottle of wine is 750ml, which roughly equates to one-fifth of the old English gallons, a common measure (fifth) because it is easy to transport, according to several wineries. Beyond that, we have the magnum (1.5 L), the marie-jeanne (2.25 L), and then we fall into the biblical names, a custom inherited from Champagne merchants of the XIX^e century: Jeroboam (3 L), Methuselah (6 L), Balthazar (12 L) and Nebuchadnezzar (15 L), among others.

Sources: Mel Magazine, Le Figaro, Munich Tourist Office, Cave AG