Hogsheads (ale) to Liters (hhd (ale) to L)

1 hogshead (ale) equals 245.48886 liters exactly.

1 hogshead (ale) = 245.48886 liters

How to convert hogsheads (ale) to liters

To convert hogsheads (ale) to liters, multiply the number of hogsheads (ale) by 245.48886. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply liters by 0.004073504598 (rounded).

liters = hogsheads (ale) × 245.48886

Example: 10 hogsheads (ale) = 2,454.8886 liters.

Pints, quarts, gallons and fluid ounces differ between the US and the UK. Units are labeled 'US' or 'imperial' to avoid confusion.

About these units

Hogshead (ale) (hhd (ale))

Imperial (British)Historical unit (no longer in standard use)

54 imperial gallons (245.5 L), one and a half UK beer barrels.

Philologists such as Walter William Skeat traced hogshead to Germanic words for a cask, for example Dutch oxhooft and Danish oxehoved, meaning ox head; the older English form was probably oxhead. Parliament first tried to standardise the cask in an act of 1423, but sizes still varied by place and by what was inside.

For ale, Wikipedia gives two figures. Under the pre-1824 beer gallon the ale hogshead is listed as 45 imperial gallons, while its chart for the 1824 system gives 54 imperial gallons, 245.5 liters, one and a half barrels. The latter is the figure used here. Other goods differed: wine hogsheads settled at 52.5 imperial gallons (238.7 L), and in 1897 Whitaker's Almanack listed 46 gallons for claret, 57 for port and 54 for sherry. Colonial sugar and tobacco hogsheads were measured by weight instead. The ale hogshead has long fallen out of use.

1 hogshead (ale) = 245.48886 liters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Hogshead; Wikipedia: Kilderkin; Wikipedia: Barrel (unit)

Liter (L)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One cubic decimeter (1,000 cm³). The everyday metric unit of volume for drinks, fuel and cooking.

The liter was born in revolutionary France. In 1795 it was introduced as a republican unit and defined as one cubic decimeter, while the gram was tied to a cubic centimeter of water. The name comes from the older French litron, itself descended from a Byzantine Greek unit of weight, not volume. A small revision of the decimeter in 1798 left the first liter about 1.000974 of today's cubic decimeter, and in 1879 the international metric authorities adopted the liter with the symbol l.

The liter then took a strange detour. In 1901 it was redefined as the space taken up by one kilogram of pure water at its densest, which made it about 1.000028 cubic decimeters, and that muddled definition lasted until 1964, when it was restored to exactly one cubic decimeter. A capital L was added as an alternative symbol in 1979 because a lowercase l is easy to mistake for the digit 1, and NIST says L is the symbol to use in the United States. A liter of water is close to a kilogram, which is why a one-liter bottle feels like a kilo in the hand.

The liter is the reference unit for volume on this site.

Sources: Wikipedia: Litre; NIST Guide to the SI, Chapter 5: units outside the SI

Related conversions

See all volume units.