A cooper is a skilled worker who makes and repairs oak barrels. Modern coopers have fewer varieties of barrel to turn out and more machines to help them, but they retain the experience, talents, and often tools that connect them with their ancestors. Barrels of oak and other woods have been an integral part of international commerce for more than two thousand years and are described by Herodotus (500 bce) and Pliny the Elder (23–79 ce), who describes the hooped wooden vessels the Celts developed, which the Romans adopted. See oak.
The cooper’s trade became more complicated in the ensuing millennia, with a maddening variety of tools needed to build and repair a bewildering variety of barrels. Each barrel for wine or spirit had its own precise shapes/sizes and other notable specific requirements of wood origin, aging and seasoning, hoop width, placement and materials, spire and bung location, and so on. See
Cooperages purchase and prepare oak for barrel making, or they may purchase prepared staves (the individual, shaped boards that are bound together to make a barrel). Whether staves are air- or kiln-dried (they are often both), the wood’s moisture content must be reduced to 10–12 percent. Air-drying staves over several years leaches many phenols from the wood, lightening its bitter, freshly sawn wood character, allowing a distillery to create more complex spirits from the resulting barrels. Wine barrel staves are toasted during and just after barrel assembly. Those for whisky barrels are steamed until the barrel is complete. Then the barrel is fired to the customer’s preferred char level.
The modern distillery movement and craft brewers’ barrel expressions help drive cooperages’ comeback, but fewer skills are required to create the slim diversity of sizes and shapes compared to those of even a century ago.
Kilby, Kenneth. The Cooper and His Trade. Fresno, CA: Linden, 1990.
Twede, Diana. “The Cask Age: The Technology and History of Wooden Barrels.” Packaging Technology and Science 18 (2005): 253–264.
By: Doug Frost