Читать книгу A Book of Britain: The Lore, Landscape and Heritage of a Treasured Countryside - Johnny Scott - Страница 34

Coopers were once numerous and independent craftsmen, whose highly skilled craft was acquired only through years of practice. Until a century ago, virtually every village had at least one cooper, with an apprentice serving the standard seven-year apprenticeship. Their role was to supply the village with rounded watertight recipients that were able to withstand stress from rolling and weight from stacking. These ranged from buckets and pails for milk and water, to barrels, casks and kegs of every size for liquids, transporting goods or storing salt, pickled food, oil and flour. In the towns and cities, the breweries each had a cooperage making barrels that started with a 4.5 gallon polypin and then doubled in capacity through firkin, kilderkin, barrel, hogshead and butt to the mighty 216 gallon tun. With commercial whisky distilling, after the Excise Act of 1823, every highland distillery had its own cooperage and a Master Cooper who oversaw the manufacture of barrels which would remain watertight for the whisky maturing process – often for over twenty-five years. In the mid-twentieth century, stainless steel and aluminium barrels became prevalent in beer making, but some specialist real ale breweries do continue to make beer in wooden barrels. Wadworth of Devizes in Wiltshire, who employ the last remaining Master Cooper in England, is an example. In Scotland, whisky is still matured in oak barrels where the tannins in the wood play an essential role in maturation, by enabling oxidation and the creation of delicate fragrance in spirits. In the village of Craigellachie, near Aberlour, in Scotland, the Speyside Cooperage produces and repairs nearly 150,000 oak casks used by the surrounding Speyside Whisky distilleries, as well as distilleries elsewhere throughout Scotland.

It is generally accepted that the Celtish tribes of the wooded Alpine region of Germany were the first people to make barrels, in around 300 BC, and the basic structure has remained more or less unchanged. Sections of oak trunks, from trees ideally aged 100 to 150 years old, are split along the grain into staves, bent and stacked in the open for between 18 and 36 months to enable the wood to dry evenly in the air. The manufacturing process requires the use of a number of well-seasoned oak staves enclosing a circular head at either end of the cask, and then bound together with steel or copper hoops. The skill of the cooper lies in making each stave, precisely shaped and bevelled, to form the tight-fitting circle of the belly of the cask.

The staves are trimmed into oblong lengths with a double taper, traditionally called ‘dressing’, then joined on a jointer known as a ‘colombe’ and given their final shape before being fitted onto a frame and arranged around an iron ‘raising up’ hoop. The shaping requires heat to modify the wood’s physical and chemical composition, which is provided by natural gas, steam or boiling water, or flames from burning wood chips, or a combination of these. If fire is used the barrel is assembled over a metal pot called a ‘chaufferette’. The cooper hammers home temporary iron hoops whilst pressing the wood with a damp cloth. The barrel heads, comprising five or six straight staves pinned together, are shaped to fit into a groove known as the ‘croze’, which is cut in the inside ends of the side staves. To finish, the outside is planed smooth and the barrel is filled with steam or water: if it is watertight the bunghole is drilled and the iron hoops are replaced with steel or copper ones.