The new law took away most of the old bottle sizes, and made liquor available in the modern “fifth”, the now-familiar 750ml, as well as a 1.75 liter bottle, one liter, 500 milliliters, 200 milliliters, and the minis: 100 milliliters and 50 milliliters, equivalent to a shot, depending on who you ask. Fifth of Sour Mash Whiskey, Tanqeray Gin, and Dewars Scotch, which are 750ml or just about 4/5 quart The Drambuie is a “pint” which is actually 375ml, or about 4/5 pint We Americans have our priorities, and it’s liquor, God bless our hearts. Are you old enough to remember when we were “just about to switch to metric” and you had to try to learn the new system in grade school? Well, liquor is one of the only things we’ve managed to switch. It did! For years.Įfforts began as early as the 1960’s to eliminate the confusing fractions brought about by the pint, quart, and gallon measurements and by the late 1970’s efforts were underway to convert liquor bottle sizes to the metric system. Imagine if supposedly quart size didn’t have a quart in them? Would you know? Now imagine if liquor came in 40 different size bottles. Although the laws governing the definition of a retailer differed by state, it was common for a customer to ask for a quart from a retailer and get something a bit less than a quart, but which was still called a quart. Why didn’t a bottle of liquor contain a quart? Why only 4/5 of a quart? These 4/5 quart bottles were called “short quarts” or “commercial quarts.” This had to do with the difference between being a liquor wholesaler versus a liquor retailer, and selling liquid by the quart was a general threshold for wholesaler. Look at the explanation above, and you may start to see why. The fifth stopped being the standard size of a U.S. However, 1/5 gallon, or 4/5 quart is 25.6 ounces, which is so very close to 750ml (25.4oz) that we still use the term fifth to describe this size bottle.
We no longer measure bottle sizes by fractions of a pint or gallon, and the term fifth may be archaic. The term fifth, however, comes from when bottles were 4/5 of a quart, which is the same as 1/5 of a gallon.
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