Beer Barrels and Casks
A barrel or cask is a hollow cylindrical container, traditionally made from wooden staves and bound with iron hoops. A barrel maker is known as a Cooper. Modern barrels are usually made from steel, aluminium and plastic.
In the United Kingdom a homebrew barrel will be a 5 (imperial) gallon plastic container with a large screw on lid and a small beer tap about an inch from the bottom.
Beer barrels usually have a convex shape i.e., they bulge in the middle. This bulge makes it simple to roll the barrel on its side and change direction with almost no effort.
Casks used for ale or beer are equipped with shives, spiles and keystones in their openings.
For 2000 years beers were produced and stored in wooden vessels, which had been lined with a various materials such as pitch to seal them against leakage. Brewers weren't the only users of barrels though. They were the most convenient form of shipping or storage container and used for all kinds of materials, from nails to gold coins.
Barrels slowly lost their importance for the storage of general goods with the growth in pallet-based logistics.
Although it is common to refer to draught beer containers of any size as barrels, this is only correct if the container actually holds 36 gallons. Where as the terms, keg and cask refer to containers of any size. The difference between kegs and casks is that kegs are used for pasteurised beers that are dispensed using an external gas source. Real ale and similar beers undergo part of their fermentation process in their containers, which are called casks.
The most common size of cask held one barrel, a brewing unit which, in medieval times, was a volume 32 Imperial gallons, but which is now 36 Imperial gallons. This volume naturally gave its name to the cask of that volume, but was eventually adopted colloquially for all sizes of cask, despite their having their own names; the 4.5-gallon "pin", the 9-gallon "firkin", the 18-gallon "kilderkin" and the 54-gallon "hogshead".
Like some other units of volume, the pre-1824 definitions continued to be used in the US, the wine gallon of 231 cubic inches staying the standard gallon for liquids, whereas in Britain that gallon was abolished and replaced by the Imperial gallon.
There are numerous casks and barrels of all shapes and sizes available on Ebay.
