spirits measure is a government-regulated liquid measure used in retailing spirits. At one point in the early twentieth century, most European countries subscribed to some version of this system, whereby every account that retailed spirits by the drink or in bulk had to use a set of approved measures, which would be periodically inspected and stamped to indicate that they had not been altered.
Most countries followed the French model with their measures, using a graduated set of handled pewter cylinders that were broadly similar in design, although countries differed in the sizes employed (France, for example, used the sequence 10 ml–20 ml–50 ml–100 ml–200 ml–500 ml–1 liter, while Italy replaced the 10-, 20-, and 200-ml measures with 12.5-, 25-, and 250-ml ones). Imperial Russia tended to favor the squat, copper charka (in Russian measures), and the United Kingdom used a dizzying variety of different designs, some of them very quaint, in quarter gills, half gills, gills, and various divisions of the pint, the quart, and the gallon.
Today, with all but the smallest quantities of spirits sold in sealed bottles, most of these systems have fallen by the wayside, although the United Kingdom still regulates its measures. Even these have been reduced to simple stainless steel cylinders (metric of course), with the sole remaining eccentricity being the fact that the basic measure is 25 ml in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland and 35 ml in Scotland.
excise taxes and distillation and jigger.Johnstone, William D. For Good Measure: A Complete Compendium of International Weights and Measures. New York: Harper Collins, 1977.
By: David Wondrich