21 litre pail bucket with lid (28kg of honey)

01 · CAPACITY

With honey you count in kilos, never in litres

Honey weighs roughly 1.4 times what water does, so the 21.1 usable litres of this bucket take about 28 kg. It is the figure that catches beginners out: work out a harvest in litres and you run short of containers; work out a shelf or a pallet in litres and you go over the load it takes. The 28 kg are approximate and move with the density of the batch and with how full you run it — to sell by weight, use scales.

02 · HANDLING

The last size that goes onto a bench without help

Full it comes to about 29 kg between bucket and honey, and that is the point of it: the next size up, the 31-litre, reaches 42 kg and needs two people or a sack truck. With this one you can still fill under the extractor, close it, take the handle and carry it to the store or the car yourself. Keep it on the floor or on a low stool while it fills and lift it afterwards, and never drag it by a single handle when full.

03 · GEOMETRY

Its mouth is not the one the bigger sizes have

Before buying a filter or a spare lid for the range as a whole, check the diameter: this one is 298.5 mm across the top and 273.3 at the base, while the 31 L opens to 359 mm and the 46 and 60 L to 374.7. Those three share parts; the 21 L does not. To rest a filter on top, its supports have to span more than those 298.5 mm: filters with a Ø320 body sit on the rim, and anything that has to drop inside stays out. The taper — the 25 mm between mouth and base — is what lets empty buckets nest and win back floor space.

04 · BEFORE YOU BUY

It is a bucket, not a honey tank: there is no outlet or thread in the base, so it fills and empties through the mouth. Wash and dry it before the first fill, write the batch on the body and not only on the lid — in a stack you only see the side — and store it closed, away from sunlight and heat sources.