Ask me about pins

Beer comes in all sorts of containers.
The biggest, the tun is 216 gallons. Half a tun (108 gallons)is a butt often used to hold rainwater.

A hogshead is half the size of a butt. Halfway between a butt and a hogshead is a puncheon at 72 gallons.

A barrel at 36 gallons is half a puncheon and used to be the size distributed to pubs. That's why the Cross Keys up the road at Ancrum has a huge winch in the restaurant area which was used to move barrels of beer when the cellar was there. Breweries still price everything in barrels which is extremely confusing.

A kilderkin is half a barrel (18 gallons) and a firkin is half a kilderkin (9 gallons). The firkin is the normal size for cask ale. Keg beer is distributed in 11 gallon containers (nominally 50 litres - though everyone still calls them "elevens" just as firkins are "nines")

At the bottom of the heap all alone is the pin, the runt of the litter holding only 4.5 gallons. We've been using pins for our cask ale because of low sales. We can usually clear a pin in a week where we'd be struggling to sell a nine.

But not this weekend. Farne Island went on sale on Friday and we'd sold three gallons of it by 7pm this evening. At this rate it won't last until tomorrow. We're getting a delivery from the Wylam brewery on Tuesday, but we may have a real ale-free day on Monday.