The Cooper's Craft

19th Century German Cooperage. Image by Anonymous artist, via Wikimedia Commons.

By Donald Albury

The Cooper's Craft

I will be exploring the cooper's tools in the Tison Tool Barn collection in a series of posts. In this post I will provide some background on the cooper's craft, which I hope will make my explanations in the next two posts of how those tools were used a little easier to understand.

A cooper is a traditional craftsman who makes round containers assembled from wooden staves and bound with hoops, with one or both ends sealed by flat ends or heads. Containers made by coopers include casks and what is often called “white cooperage”, such as buckets, tubs, vats, water tanks, and butter churns. Casks (often called barrels, although a barrel is just one size of cask) bulge in the middle, with curved staves, and have both ends closed when they are full. Buckets, tubs, churns and such have straight staves, and are closed on only one end.

Wood bucket in the Matheson History Museum. Photo by Donald Albury.

Various Buckets, Tubs and Butter Churns. Photo by Pleple2000, via Wikimedia Commons.

Casks are made in many sizes besides barrels. Traditionally, a barrel is a size of cask which holds between 25 and 50 gallons. The size of a barrel (or any other cask) depends on what it was used for and where and when it was made; English and French wine barrels, ale barrels, beer barrels, and whiskey barrels all have had different capacities. The sizes of various ale and beer casks in England were changed several times by Act of Parliament. The gallon with which cask capacity was measured also has varied by type: wine gallon (on which the U. S. liquid gallon is based), ale or beer gallon, corn gallon (a dry measure), and imperial gallon. Modern cask sizes are often measured in liters.

Traditional English Wine Cask Sizes. Image by Grolltech, via Wikimedia Commons.

The above illustration shows traditional (before 1824) English wine casks in descending order of size. A wine tun held 262 wine gallons (a tun would therefore hold about a ton of wine). Traditional English beer casks were, in descending order, called tuns, butts, hogsheads, barrels, kilderkins, firkins, and pins. A beer tun held 218 ale gallons, while a beer pin held 4 ½ ale gallons. The wine gallon equals the U. S. liquid gallon, while the ale gallon was a little larger than the British imperial gallon, so a beer tun was approximately the same size as a wine tun.

Almost anything could be stored and shipped in a cask: flour, seeds, fruit (the apple barrel in Treasure Island), vegetables, crackers (hardtack), pickles (famously sold out of barrels in country stores), salt pork and beef (in brine), oil (whale oil, and later, petroleum), water, wine, beer, or liquor. Gunpowder and heavy items such as nails or other hardware were shipped in smaller casks called kegs. Liquids such as wine were often stored in larger casks. Almost all the food, and all of the water, on sailing ships was stored in barrels. While they have largely been replaced by cardboard, glass, plastic, and metal containers, wooden casks are still used today for aging beer, wine, and liquor.

Five Gallon Coca-Cola® Syrup Keg at the Matheson History Museum. Photo by Donald Albury.

Casks are easy to store and move. A cask is stable when standing on end. When the head is knocked out of the cask bulk contents can be easily reached. Liquids can be dispensed in small quantities from a cask using a tap. An unopened cask can be turned on its side, and rolled. A cask is easier than a similar sized box to lift onto a ship in a sling or move into a cellar.

Detail from 17th century illustration showing a wine barrel being hoisted by a crane. Image by Wenceslaus Hollar, via Wikimedia Commons

Casks have been made and used for at least 2,000 years. Coopering, the making of casks, developed into a sophisticated technology. Until the 19th century, coopering was a demanding manual craft. It required extensive skills, acquired through years of apprenticeship, and a number of specialized tools. Factories using machinery took over most the coopering trade in the 19th century. Wooden casks and "white-cooperage" goods are seldom used now, but some casks used for aging whiskey and high-end wine and beer are still made by craftsmen using hand tools. The Tison Tool Barn has examples of some of the specialized hand tools used by coopers. Next week I will describe some of the tools used by coopers to shape staves.

Disclaimer: I did not know anything about coopering until I became curious about the cooper's tools in the Tison Tool Barn. I have researched the subject on the Internet and found tantalizing hints, speculation, contradictions, blurry images of old books, and what I hope is relatively reliable, if incomplete, information. I have tried to hold my own speculation in check. Some sources I consulted for this post are:

'Cooper (profession)', at Wikipedia
'Barrel', at Wikipedia
The Cooper (Bedford County)
Eighteenth Century French Coopers
Making Wooden Buckets

All photographs by Donald Albury in this blog are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.