Why We Still Ask for a ‘Fifth’ at Liquor Shops, and the 1980 Law That Shrank U.S. Booze Bottles

When it comes to measurements, most people — including Americans themselves — are eager to criticize the United States for its rejection of the metric system. Instead of embracing international units of measurement like liters, meters, and grams, the U.S. Customary System opts for units like gallons, inches, and pounds. But in one instance when the U.S. required a certain industry to make the pivot to metric, many citizens were not so pleased.

On Jan. 1, 1980, the federal government passed a law that mandated the American liquor industry adopt metric system norms, converting the volume measurements on all spirits bottles in the U.S. to liters. (A law required wine bottles to convert to metric units the previous year.) The U.S. made the switch in an effort to streamline trading booze across borders — a shift the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had pushed for years.

But the law didn’t just change the numbers displayed on the side of each bottle — in changing the units, the booze industry also started producing an entirely new set of bottle sizes. And when the law went into effect at the start of 1980, observant shoppers noticed their go-to bottle of liquor had shrunk.

The bottles that notoriously took the hit were the “fifths,” which were popular among consumers for their convenient size and easy-to-remember name. Equal to one-fifth of a gallon, “fifths” came out to around 757 milliliters. But under the new law, those were replaced with 750 milliliter bottles to match the metric system’s standards. The law also instated five additional bottle volumes: 50 milliliters, 200 milliliters, 500 milliliters, 1 liter, and 1 ¾ liters.

A 7 milliliter decrease might seem like a drop in the bucket, and it is: A jigger equates to roughly 44 milliliters, meaning each fifth lost just a fraction of a shot. So, it might come as a surprise that the slight change in bottle size caused quite the uproar among consumers.

People were so outraged that the news usurped other, more impactful laws that came with the new decade — including a $0.20 raise to the federal minimum wage. The fifth was such a cultural touchpoint at the time that the alcohol industry’s new system dominated the conversation. On Dec. 31, 1979, the Washington Post published the headline “Era of the Fifth to End With New Year” and the subheadline “Introducing Smaller Fifths, Higher Taxes.”

While the switch to metric became mandatory in 1980, liquor companies began pivoting to the measurement system as early as 1976 as part of a multi-year effort to ease in the industry’s new sizings. Beyond “fifths,” others within the previous system had easy calling cards as well — such as “quart,” “half gallon,” and “gallon” — and over the course of those four transitional years, consumers and tradespeople alike were stuck in a firestorm over what to call the new sizes.

As the old sizes phased out, many pitched new monikers for customers to use when they entered a liquor store. For instance, the Distilled Council Spirits Council of the United States (DICSUS) proposed referring to 200-milliliter bottles as “miniatures,” whereas some distillers hoped for the term “flasks” to catch on. In 1976, the then-president of DISCUS told the New York Times, “There are myriad problems in this industry, and this is one of them. We wanted to have uniform nomenclature, but it doesn’t seem to be working out that way.” His suspicion rings true today: There still isn’t a set terminology for bottle sizes beyond “handle” for 1 ¾ liters and the “fifth,” which stuck despite the volume no longer measuring to one fifth of a gallon.

After all, the switch from 757 milliliters was just a minor shrink, and the 750 milliliters are nearly identical to what were once fifths. So, whenever you hear the calling card “fifth,” know that you aren’t getting one fifth of a gallon but rather one percent less.

The article Why We Still Ask for a ‘Fifth’ at Liquor Shops, and the 1980 Law That Shrank U.S. Booze Bottles appeared first on VinePair.