A friend and I were discussing
Samuel Adams and the questions was raised as to whether or not he was responsible for
the beer that takes his name. Turns out it's a homage and while Samuel was a brewer, the beer comes many years after he passed on.
As is not particularly uncommon, I'm reading away and I come across a randomly used customary unit (in this case US customary, not Imperial);
the barrel. So exactly how much is a barrel anyway? Well, as usual with customary units, it depends.
Questions you need to answer about how much volume is in a barrel before you can understand what you're talking about:
- Is it wet or dry?
- Dry barrels: 115.6 liters
- Are we talking about oil?
- Oil barrels: 159 liters (you can get more accurate than that, but it's not worth it)
- Are we talking about beer or other liquids (mostly wine)?
- Wine barrels: 119.3 liters
- OK, so we're finally down to just beer. What countries' units are we talking about, US or UK?
- US beer barrels: 117.3 liters
- UK beer barrels: 163.7 liters (interestingly, Google calculates it as 136.3 liters instead, but I can't find a reference for this value)
Then of course, there's the option that you're measuring
weight instead of volume.
Note that there may be some errors in the actual numbers for wine barrels and UK beer barrels as the documentation I could find online isn't exactly clear.
Compare to the metric:
- It's volume we're talking about right?
- Liters or cubic meters (with a conversion of liters x 0.001 = cubic meters)
See, no difference for wet, dry, beer or wine. It's all the same and all easy to work with. Why do we put ourselves through this misery again?
While doing the research for this article, I also bumped into
US tax code. So if beer and oil were both taxed at $7 per barrel (yes, this is hypothetical), you'd expect them to have the same tax rate right? Well, unfortunately, no. If you look at the conversions above, it turns out that the rates would be:
- beer: 6 cents per liter
- oil: 4 cents per liter
Wow, all that confusing math just to work out that what at first would seem like equal taxation actually works out to mean that oil is taxed at 2/3 of the rate of beer.
It's time to stop the deception. Demand metric from your
representatives and
senators today!
