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The History of the Barrel, or There and Back Again
It’s said that necessity is the mother of invention, but that puts so much pressure on the situation. More likely, just coming upon something useful-looking is the mother of invention. Witness the ape in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” artificially inspired though he may have been, finding a use for that bone; or imagine the gadgeteer, covered in hair, who “invented” the wheel. It seems therefore likely—and it’s definitely legendary—that the first wooden vessels were not so much invented as discovered, as hollow logs variously full of rainwater. Take things a handyman’s step further and both technique and materials are improved—healthy wood replacing the rotting or lightning-blasted, tools doing the work of time and happenstance, perhaps at first with a bit of hide stretched across the openings—and culture suddenly steps forward along a couple of courses, the musical and the utilitarian. We’ll leave the former alone, but the latter is why we’re here.
Nor is a vessel necessarily a barrel. There are bowls, there are pots, and there are jars. There are the skins of animals, stitched together and closeable, perhaps lined with something impermeable, portable for a journey. There are also buckets and tubs, pieced together from wood and somehow bound together, and this is where barrels begin to be born. An Egyptian drum in the Metropolitan Museum dated a handful of centuries BCE may not be a barrel, or even an actual vessel, but its stave construction shows an awareness of the type of handiwork later to become so familiar to innumerable generations of coopers.
Romans and (Celtic) Countrymen—Wood Replaces Clay
Before there were barrels there were amphorae. Made of hardened clay and large enough to hold a mercantile amount of contents, they were constructed for both strength and movability, and were in common use in Asia and throughout the Mediterranean region for several thousand years. A roughly egg-shaped vessel, surmounted by a relatively narrow opening and a couple of handles to facilitate rolling on a narrow reinforced foot, not unlike the way a barrel or a cylinder of compressed gas is spun along on its edge today, amphorae could be moved relatively easily for their weight, and were nestled into wagons or the holds of boats for further transport. Standard volume was about 70 liters (18.5 gallons), and their filled weight could have been in excess of 100 kg (220 pounds), given that the contents alone would comprise nearly three quarters of that. Slight differentiation of shape or construction helped a likely illiterate workforce keep the products of one merchant separate from another, but as containers of transport they were invariably switched one to another as they were reused. Pliny the Elder outlined instructions for their use as containers for wine, including a cleaning regimen involving salt water and ashes.
Huge dumps of these broken remains have been found throughout Europe, which points to their ubiquity of use. (It also points to an advantage of barrels made of wood.) Amphorae continued to be commonly used into the third century CE, but the concept that would eventually become the barrel was developed in the various Celtic territories of northern Europe between 1000 and 500 BCE. This amounted to simple bucket construction, beginning, no doubt, with a single piece of wood and the repair demanded by thrift. Over time, and by the use of tools advancing from stone to bronze to iron, multiple pieces could be dressed and joined, to the point at which it made sense to enclose the top as well as the bottom for ease of enclosure and shipment, as well as security against contamination by air and vermin. The first barrels were made of readily available and relatively malleable woods such as pine, poplar, and palm, but the bending of hardwoods with the aid of heat, as well as the advanced joinery made possible by superior tools, brought about vessels more reliably watertight and sturdy. The exchange of ideas and techniques between tribes moved development incrementally along, and as an invading presence the Romans appropriated the technology, eventually seeing fit to favor the barrel over heavier and more fragile earthenware.
A couple of key points of construction made all this possible. Some kind of bottom would need to be devised and connected to whatever wooden pieces constituted the walls. A groove running around the inner surface of the vessel would become be the best way to do this, in order to secure the bottom into each piece, or stave, and taking advantage of the fact that wood swells when wet, thereby tightening the connection. In addition, the whole thing would need to be bound together. Initially this would probably have been accomplished with hide or vines, but at some point soft and pliable wood would come to do the trick, tightening about the vessel as it dried. Finally, whether by steam or direct fire, heat applied to the wood would make it more workable, less prone to breakage when bent, and able to be brought together to hold a second head, or bottom, in place. Henry H. Work in his book Wood, Whiskey, and Wine (2014) suggests an inspirational waystation in the development of the barrel as the urge to stick two buckets together to form a single vessel. This seems a bit literal and cumbersome, but could possibly have provided Celtic inspiration.
Not all wood is equally suitable for the making of barrels. As time and construction advanced, different woods came to be used for different purposes as barrels, dictated by innate properties such as porosity, pliability, durability, weight, and possible flavors imparted to consumable contents. Makers of barrels were likely woodworkers of other types—boat and wagon builders, furniture makers, and the like—and oak came to be the dominant wood used. It is estimated that 45% of all fabricated oak was used during the second century CE for the production of barrels, and that figure nearly doubled in the century that followed as barrels came into more general use and the demand for them increased drastically (Work 2014).
Barrels may have gained dominance over earthenware in the early centuries CE, but their mention and appearance in classical literature and art appears far earlier. Herodotus of Halicarnassus wrote in the fifth century BCE of wine barrels made of palmwood transported along the Euphrates. The geographer Strabo (64/63 BC–24 CE) mentions barrels as big as houses, and Trajan’s column, named for the Roman emperor and completed in CE 113, depicts barrels loaded aboard ships to provision the campaign against the Dacians. Even more directly were barrels employed as tools of war, with flaming barrels filled with pitch and tallow rolled downhill by Gallic defenders against the Romans at the battle of Uxellodunum in 51 BCE, and empty barrels employed as a sort of pontoon bridge at the siege of Aquileja in 238 CE. It is from the Latin word cupa, meaning “tub,” that words denoting cooperage derive. Also of etymological interest is the edict of Ine, a seventh century king of Wessex, prescribing rent payments in “ambers” of ale—the word certainly designating casks but deriving from the more classical amphora.
Figure 1.1—Trajan’s column, named for the Roman emperor and completed in CE 113, depicts barrels loaded aboard ships to provision the campaign against the Dacians. Photo credit © Roger B. Ulrich by permission
Vessels of Wood—Barrels, Boats, and Brewing
Literary and historical mention of barrels, as with so many other things, mainly clams up for around a thousand years after the Classical Age, but the knowledge that brewing and winemaking continued throughout those so-called Dark Ages keeps us on the path regarding what was happening with barrels and other wooden vessels. Nordic brewing traditions extending into our own time offer perhaps a dim view of the progress and presence of carved and coopered brewing vats, including the storied hollowed log used for the making of Finnish Sahti. Its use is well described in one of the many treatises of Odd Nordland on Nordic and Scandinavian culture, Brewing and Beer Traditions in Norway: the Social Anthropological Background of the Brewing Industry (1969). Hollowed lengthwise and tipped slightly to allow for gentle runoff, the log was layered with lattices of juniper, spruce, birch or alder twigs, and straw, prefiguring the slotted false bottom of later mash and lautering vessels. A typically variegated grain mash, sparged with brewing liquor often steeped with juniper, provided wort, and whether boiled or not, fermentation inevitably ensued, no doubt in wood. As with the African calabas, or fermenting gourd, the mother of invention stands by.
Other northern European brewing vessels more closely resembled barrels, and many of their descendants are still with us today. One can see broad, barrel-like brewhouse vessels of wood in the guild house of the brewers in The Grand Place in Brussels—as well as steel-lined or jacketed versions throughout Belgium and the Netherlands. These are primarily tuns used for mashing and lautering, but before copper and steel could be worked into large vessels, boiling kettles were often made of wood, fired in ancient times by the introduction of hot matter such as the super-heated stones of the atavistic German steinbier. In many cases the wort was simply not boiled, but mashed, lautered, fermented, racked, and packaged, all in wood.
But if our study is to stay more closely to barrels themselves we must acknowledge that the vessels we’ve come to consider mainly in connection with the shipment and storage of liquids were, through most of their history, ubiquitous as shipping containers for nearly anything one can think of. Barrels for volume products such as beer and wine no doubt dominated the manufacture of medieval coopers, but myriad other products, including meat and fish, sugars and syrups, soap, butter, glue, tobacco, cabbages, turpentine, and vegetable, whale, and petroleum oils, were throughout recorded history shipped in barrels requiring both sturdiness and tightness of construction. Dry products such as nails and other hardware were consigned to barrels of less exacting manufacture, but prior to the mid-twentieth century introduction of cardboard boxes, steel drums, and the standardized, box-like shipping containers that today fill barges and huge, seagoing ships, the barrel was the preeminent unit of shipping.
The warship Vasa was perhaps the biggest embarrassment in Swedish naval history. Constructed between 1626 and 1628, it was intended to be Sweden’s flagship during its war with Poland-Lithuania. But the Vasa was top-heavy, and within minutes of its maiden voyage foundered and sank only 1300 meters from where it set sail. There it lay in calm, fresh-to-brackish water until rediscovered in the 1950s, and it was raised in 1961 with much of its contents well preserved, including a wealth of barrels containing butter, beer, and brandy, and smaller, one-foot-tall barrels holding the personal effects of the crew, which included knives, gloves, coins, and tools.
The Vasa and its contents embody two of the artisanal elements of barrel making. First there are the barrels themselves, showing by their presence and the variety of contents within them just how dominant the barrel had come to be for storage and shipping of practically anything. The other is shipbuilding, which requires the same skills of bending and joinery to craft watertight ships for war and commerce as those for making barrels and foeders. Barrels and ships are inextricably linked, in fact, not only through kinship of craft but in a symbiosis of purpose. Variously filled, barrels settled securely in the holds of ships, and as advancement in tools and technique allowed for the building of bigger ships, more barrels were made to fill them. Naval stores, as well, were packed in barrels, safe from spoilage and infestation. Without barrels, ships could not have sailed round the world. One might even say that barrels made long distance sailing and exploration possible.
Messages in Barrels—Regulation, the Hanseatic League, and Other Alliances of Trade
Barrels were manufactured and filled at the shipping sources of Europe, dominant beer and winemaking centers preeminent among them. Records of shipment and regulation in England and among the mercantile confederation of the Hanseatic League trace the prominence of barrels as containers for the shipping of countless products and as a commodity in themselves, influencing economies and diplomacy. Historian Richard Unger’s book Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (2004) is peppered with references to the use, manufacture, regulation, and gradual standardization of barrels in northern Europe. The Hanseatic League bound together shipping cities along the North and Baltic Seas, providing mutual protection from marauders and regulating trade. At first, each brewing town would have its own standard-sized barrel, supposedly to eventually be returned. Marks were devised to differentiate them by brewery, town, and beer type—one such system in Ghent decreed by no less than The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. With time, however, the wisdom of broader standardization asserted itself, and in 1375 the barrel of Rostock was adopted as the common size by Lübeck, Wismar, and other northern German towns. Hamburg kept its own-sized barrel until it, too, acceded to standardization in 1480. As today, concerns were strong that barrels would be used by brewers other than those to whom they belonged, or that they would simply disappear.
Through its increasing enabling of shipping and commerce, the cooper’s trade came to be differentiated from other woodworkers and was among the first to band together as a labor union. Guild rolls in Leicester included coopers as early as 1196. Officially chartered in 1501, but thought to have existed for at least a couple of hundred years before that, the London cooper union was sufficiently esteemed to be designated several yards along the parade route of the coronation of Henry VIII. Much was decreed and legislated during Henry’s reign that affected the cooperage and brewing industries. Like his European counterparts, he implemented standardization of barrel sizing, and he prohibited the shipping of beer abroad in any container larger than a barrel. In an early conservation measure expressing concern at the deforestation of Britain for the construction of barrels, legislation was also adopted requiring the importation of an amount of wood equal to that represented by the export of barrels. In France, forests that are still protected—farmed, in fact—for the ongoing production of barrels for the wine and spirits industries first came under government supervision for shipbuilding in 1669, a commitment later renewed by Napoleon II. Timber harvest in France was also prohibited within 47.2 miles (76 km) of the sea and 18 miles (29 km) from any inland waterway in order to curtail illicit cutting. Back in Britain, not many years later, the guild and its standards were further protected by the outlawing of the activities of itinerant, disenfranchised coopers. Even brewers were prohibited from making barrels themselves, generally necessitating the employment of in-house coopers. Even as recently as the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Bass brewery in Burton-on-Trent employed 400 coopers, and 1500 were still building barrels for the herring industry in 1913.
It may seem strange from our distance to have kings and emperors making it their business to form policies where such ordinary-seeming things as barrels are concerned. In fact, it’s a kind of who’s who of a couple of centuries’ worth of royalty and celebrity to track some of this regulation and activity. History may have given Richard III a bit of a bum rap—being dug up from beneath a parking lot has certainly given his legacy a pathetic touch—but he, too, got into the act, setting the standard size for wine barrels at 33.5 Imperial gallons, purportedly reactive to the smaller size of Dutch barrels used for the shipping of hopped beer (Unger 2004). In 1482, toward the end of his reign, complaints from Flemish quarters caused barrels of sherry shipped northward from Spain to be standardized at 30 arrobas, or around 486 liters, and prohibitions put in place against prior use of fish or oil in barrels later used for holding beverages. Other intra-regional political drama arose concerning barrels, with supplies of beer from Bremen and Hamburg sent to Bavaria interrupted by the sectarian and geographical divisions of The Reformation. Looking at the importance of barrel-related matters below the line of royalty, a 1376 census of some 1050 citizens of Hamburg found that 457 of them declared themselves as brewers, and an additional 104 as master coopers.
Barrels Across the World—Exploration and Industry
Like the great mercantile era mentioned above, the age of exploration and colonization would not have been possible without the barrel. Long voyages required extensive provisioning, with barrels holding pitch for repairs, turpentine for cleaning, beer, spirits, food, and water. In his journal, Columbus noted the loading of the last barrel of beef in August of 1492 as he prepared to sail from Seville, and later replenished water barrels on the island of San Salvador in what is now the Bahamas. In provisioning naval ships, barrels were effectively supplies of war. In an attack on Cadiz, Spain, prior to the 1588 invasion of England by the Spanish Armada, Sir Francis Drake had thousands of captured barrels destroyed. Leaky, perhaps hastily-constructed replacements laid one more straw across the back of the ill-fated attack.
Soon barrels began traversing the Atlantic, first as containers for provisions for colonizing voyages, then subsequently back in the other direction once staves and barrels came to be manufactured from native American oak (so much for the managed forests of Britain). Still, barrels in the New World—and coopers—were often scarce. In time, however, a robust coopers trade arose in the American colonies, drawing English craftsmen for its relatively high rate of pay, and exporting barrels—both assembled and in staves—as well as products such as salted cod and tobacco, which were shipped, of course, in barrels. The first American trade union is thought to have been convened by coopers and allied tradesmen in 1645; a few years later consolidating groups in Boston and Charlestown, Massachusetts, and other parts of New England. Barrels were shipped from the New World to the wine regions of Europe, eventually spurring subsequent reuse in the developing seventeenth century Scotch whiskey industry. As things soured between the American colonies and their home country, local production of both beer and barrels was deemed desirable not only for consistent supply and result, but also as lessening reliance on the economy and caprice of those across the Atlantic. Once war broke out, it was aboard a submersible barrel, the Turtle, that David Bushnell attempted to attach a time bomb to the British flagship Eagle in New York Harbor on September 7, 1776—the first submarine attack in history.
The fishing industry has been mentioned as a large consumer of barrels. Whaling, as well, demanded their use, sending coopers along on ships to manufacture heads, staves, and bungs on the outward journey, and to assemble and maintain barrels for filling with oil. And speaking of oil, once crude petroleum oil was discovered during 1859 in Pennsylvania and Ohio, so many barrels were required for shipping to refineries that supplies elsewhere were difficult to secure. The quality of barrels required for the petroleum industry was high, and they were lined with flake glue to enhance impermeability. The simultaneous, mid-nineteenth century development of the railroads did nothing to lessen demand, especially as they were large oil consumers themselves.
By this time barrels were increasingly made by machines, many types of which were devised to speed and automate the processes previously enacted by hand coopers. Stave knives and special planes and saws were manufactured beginning in the late 1830s and ’40s by such firms as Baxter D. Whitney in Winchendon, Massachusetts, and Hunter Brothers Saw Manufacturing Company in Rochester, New York. The Allied Barrel Corporation in Oil City, Pennsylvania, started as a hand cooper’s shop but grew into a large machine cooperage, even developing its own rail cars designed to hold over 500 50-gallon barrels. Many oil barrels saw second use as water barrels for protection against fire along the rail lines. By 1871, however, the first steel tanks began to appear for rail shipment, and in 1865 the first pipeline was laid near Oil City, five miles long and prefiguring the dramatic lessening of reliance on the cooperage industry to come.
Still, the heyday of the cooperage industry had a few more decades left, incidentally marked by the 1901 descent over Niagara Falls by Annie Edson Taylor in a barrel. Some data is relatively easy to track, as there was a duty imposed on both stave and head production. In 1906 some 721 US mills reported production of 65 million slack barrels for containment of dry goods, made from such diverse woods as elm, pine, red gum, maple, beech, red oak, chestnut, birch, ash, spruce, cottonwood, hemlock, basswood, and sycamore. That same year, 18 million tight barrels were produced, with 1.6 million for beer among them, down from 1.9 million the previous year. Pressures from two sides are cited for this decline: the rise of packaged beer in bottles, and the demand exerted by the petroleum industry, whose barrel usage rose dramatically over the decades from 5 million barrels in 1865 to 140 million in 1906, an increase of 17 million alone since 1905. A look at the inventory of barrels at the Bass brewery in Burton-upon-Trent in1889 shows 40,499 butts, 133,464 hogsheads, 127,592 barrels, 147,969 kilderkins and 68,587 firkins—over half a million, all told, and all of wood. The repeal of prohibition saw a slight and expectable rise in barrel production, but only relative to the supposedly dry years that preceded it—10 million tight barrels in 1935, with 4 million of those going to alcoholic beverages, and only 665,000 for beer. Some 10 million staves were fashioned in the interior southern states, mainly by Austrian and Yugoslav immigrants. As to the sustainability of the industry, it was estimated by Dewers (1948) that in 1947, 2,751 million board feet (6.5 million cubic meters) of oak were cut in the United States, 98% of which went to the construction of barrels, and an additional 23,200 million board feet (54.8 million cubic meters) were left standing in the forest.
The Sun Also Rises—the Shifting Nature and Use of the Barrel
But just like that the wooden barrel was relegated to retro status, something esoterically useful but generally evocative of an earlier, simpler time. As the twentieth century marched forward, tankers carried the world’s oil, and steel drums contained all manner of products previously consigned to barrels. Within the beverage industries packaging methods improved to dominance as a way of getting beer, wine, and spirits to consumers in bottles and cans. Steel kegs proved more durable and reliable than wood for draft products; they did not require the services of a specialized artisan for their maintenance. A modern demand for cleanliness, consistency, and stability cast aspersions on the potential vagaries of beer poured from actual barrels, and an expanded, truer world economy sent beer across continents and oceans. The very word barrel came more to mean a unit of measure than to describe an object, and most people needed to be told what a cooper was. Barrels continued to be made, of course, but their use was specialized within the wine and spirits industries. In Kentucky, where bourbon reigned and barrels were still needed, legislation was adopted to protect what coopers remained by mandating the single use of a new oak barrel for production of anything carrying the name. This action alone would loom large in the next phase of life for the barrel as we now know it.
Today, as always, barrels are manufactured near the seats of production of what they will come to contain. No longer used for oil or fish or tobacco or cabbages—or hats—their use is dominated by the wine and spirits industries. In France, modern cooperages are located in Burgundy and Bordeaux, near wine and cognac producers; in Kentucky and Scotland, in connection with the Bourbon and Scotch whiskey industries; in California, Spain, and other wine growing regions. Some 2.5 million new barrels are manufactured each year. Wine and bourbon are the main industry users of new oak, with bourbon limiting use to a single turn, after which the barrels are passed on primarily to whiskey producers in Scotland and Ireland. Port, sherry, and cognac barrels also make their way into the whiskey trade.
This is where we as brewers enter the picture once more. Use of barrels in our history was primarily as a means of shipping and serving, with barrels lined with pitch or another material to enhance tightness and retain carbonation. Among the many discoveries—and rediscoveries—within the modern craft brewing movement is the second- and third-use wine and spirits barrels to age, flavor, and otherwise influence beer.
As varied and interesting as the history of the barrel itself is, it is this last use with which we are primarily concerned in this book. Other consumables industries are relevant both as engines for barrel production and as background for the uses to which barrels have been put, as well as the flavor influence that some of these other products can impart to finished beer. Wine from grapes and spirits from grains have been mentioned, but barrels used for the aging of beer have in some cases held such things as tequila, brandy, rum, sake and other non-grape wines, maple syrup—even soy, fish, and chili sauces, in many cases after first having held something else either vinous or spirituous. No less varied are the beers that have been aged in barrels. The modern use of barrels for beer may have begun with full-flavored dark beers receiving augmented flavors from bourbon barrels, but today the variety of style and treatment enacted by mainly small brewers has brought to the brewing world a whole new realm of beers dark, pale, red, woody, tart, and sour in endlessly varied combination. The emergent micro-distilling movement has made for some interesting symbioses with brewing, and brewers, too.
In the following chapters we will examine the properties and characteristics of wood—primarily oak—that make it particularly suitable and intriguing for the aging of beer. Barrels and foeders are the containers to which we will refer, with analysis and advice as to their selection, use, and maintenance. Having developed in their history from vessels to hold and store liquids to the dominant shipping container of many an age, we will bring them back to their conceptual point of origin, specifically in connection with beer.
Like any historical current, this one proceeds in fits and starts. There are precedents as well as exceptions, gradual discoveries in one quarter long in use in another. Brewing traditions in Belgium, for example, have incorporated wood for centuries, making opportunistic use in some cases of its suitability as a harbor for yeast and other microflora. Brewers in winemaking regions such as California, Spain, and Italy have borrowed from those traditions and practices to produce new beers and hybrid beverages using grapes, herbs, and spices. Sometimes there are secrets. This is not to say that the primary use of barrels as shipping containers for beer did not also contribute to its culture. As a commodity beer shaped itself as well as the world around it. There’s no end of documentation to provide this picture, and while taking a quick look at it might seem tangential to those eager to put beer into barrels and see what it does there, it, too, is a part of how we all got here.