Maybe someone will have a logical answer to this, I guess this highlights my touch of ocd. Why would a product sell something in 17oz or 1lbs & 1oz?
What is the practical logic behind this? (yes I keep a bottle of sriracha in my office and just noticed this)
Who can answer the 17oz riddle for me???
There is a Chinese weight known as a jin or a catty, and it weighs 17 ounces.
See that! Thank you very much! lol
there you go is right - learn something new every day.
Now it makes me wonder if the jin/catty or 17 oz is based on some numerology/superstition history. It is so close to the weight of a pound that is seems too coincidental that two cultures came up with the same measure independently (but of course that could be too). Or maybe the jin came first (what do I know). But curious indeed.
I first got to know of the catty on a visit to Hong Kong. And to make things confusing, there’s the new catty and the old catty. I don’t remember which is which.
a very quick wiki search seems like the jin/catty is tied to the metric system - so 1 jin = .5kg
so if that’s the case - this is 482 g . . . so not quite a jin
(who knew measurements were so interesting)
I wonder if was just a function of the bottle size, since those are weight measurements not volume measurements . . . .
Anyone can google, it takes an especially lazy person to ask here and let others do their googling for them!
I think I’ll resolve the whole thing with a glass of gin.
How many jin’s of gin?
60 times the quantity of vermouth.
I have no idea what the jin/catty was originally based on (probably something much like the grain kernels, human thumbs, and beer barrels that gave rise to pre-metric European units of measurements 
) but I’d bet fairly serious money that the “jin” predates the “metric system” but numerous centuries if not a millennium or two, and that the metric equivalence of (“exactly”) “500 grams” is merely one of convenience.
But it is interesting. These days I generally assume that “odd” avoirdupois measurements are the result of metric packaging and in this case, would probably have conflated solid ounces with fluid ounces and assumed it was in fact a “500 ml” bottle (which is at least in the ballpark of 17 fl ounces), but of course I would’ve been wrong…
Last night I was pondering if somewhere in China there was a food blogger who was looking at some American product that had only 16jin/catty in it and wondered; “Why would someone sell a product that was just .1 jin/catty short of a full”. (no I wasn’t stoned)
