What is Coopering?

Coopering is the craft of making wooden vessels (e.g., Barrels, Tankards, Buckets, etc.) from staves of wood. It's a craft that has been practiced from ancient times. Barrels are depicted on Ancient Egyptian tomb paintings and are mentioned several times in the Bible (e.g.,  1 Kings 18:33). They are also mentioned by Ancient Greek and Roman writers (Strabo, writing in AD21, mentions wooden casks and describes the Celts as 'fine coopers', adding that they use pitch to stop leaks). 

Most people know that coopers make barrels, but coopers themselves would say that they make Casks, since a barrel is simply one specific type of cask, one holding 36 gallons (N.B. - Ale and Beer brewers used to belong to different guilds and they used different sizes. For example, an Ale barrel was 32 pints, but the sizes were standardised in 1824). However, in common useage the word 'barrel' has come to mean any sort of wooden cask and that is how I will use it in the following.

Barrels were multi-purpose, multi-use containers. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, most goods were transported in wooden barrels of one kind or another. There were a great many people employed in the coopering trade making these barrels but not all were equally skillful. 

The least skilled were the Dry Coopers, so called because they made barrels intended to hold dry goods such as Apples, Nails, Salt Fish, etc. These barrels (sometimes referred to as 'slack' barrels) didn't need to be made to very exacting standards and they were often made of cheap or inferior wood since they were usually intended to be used just once. They usually had wooden (Ash) hoops and were often lined with paper sacks. Machinery was developed during the middle of the nineteeth century which was accurate enough to make these 'slack' barrels, and the craft of Dry Coopering was one of the first to disappear as a result of industrialisation.

At the next level of coopering were the Dry-Tight Coopers. They made barrels to hold goods such as Flour, Butter, etc. They needed to work to a far higher standard than the Dry Coopers, but not quite to the standard of those making barrels to hold liquids. Dry-Tight barrels would be made of good-quality wood, (but not necessarily of Oak) and would be hooped with iron hoops, since they would be expected to last for many years and be re-used many times. However, before the nineteenth century most barrels were made with wooden hoops. It was only when iron became relatively cheap due to mass production that barrels with iron hoops became common. When King Henry the second of that name sent Thomas a'Beckett to Paris as an ambassador in the twelveth century, he ordered Thomas to impress the French with the wealth of England. Amongst other things, Thomas took with him barrels of English ale, and the barrels had iron hoops. The French were vastly impressed by this extravagance. 

At the top of the profession came the Wet Coopers, who were so skillful that they could make barrels that could hold liquids. Everyone thinks of Beer or Whiskey barrels in this context, but many other liquids needed to be carried, such as Syrup, Vinegar, Pickles, or even just Drinking Water for use on ships during long sea voyages. An Oak barrel made by a Wet Cooper might last fifty years or more. In recognition of their superior skills, Wet Coopers were paid more than ordinary coopers. Being a Wet Cooper was a very prideful thing. A lady I met at an exhibition told me that on tracing her family history, she'd found her great-grandfather's death certificate with his occupation shown as Wet Cooper. The point being that the distinction between Cooper and Wet Cooper was so important that the status had to be preserved, even after death. At one time the apprenticeship period was 7 years, but it's well to remember that the purpose of long apprenticeships was partly at least to keep down the numbers of people entering the craft, and thereby keep wages high. The apprenticeship period was eventually reduced to 5 years.

There was also another category of Coopers, called White Coopers (possibly because they often worked with Sycamore, a pale coloured wood. This wood is particularly useful for making vessels to store food, since it doesn't impart any taste to the food). White Coopers made coopered vessels for domestic use, such as Laundry Tubs, etc., and for the dairy industry, making Milking Pails, Butter Churns, etc. They weren't exclusively coopers though. They also served almost as village carpenters and could make any of the standard house and farm requirements, as is demonstrated by the famous rhyming cooper's shop sign at Hailsham which read ' Here, Wratten, cooper, lives and makes - Ox bows, trug baskets and hay rakes - sells shovels both for flour and corn, - And shauls, and makes a good box churn.....'. 

White Coopering was one of the areas where true Coopering overlapped with more general Woodworking. Whilst a Woodworker would not be able to make a tight barrel, he might well be able to make one of the simpler coopered items, such as a Wooden Tankard or Wooden Bucket, particularly if he used pitch to seal leaks. It's important to remember that in the days when village communities were small and widely-separated and roads were bad, a local man who could turn his hand to a wide variety of tasks was more highly-regarded than a specialist who could perform only one task, however perfectly. Wooden Tankards are a good example of this. They were never really produced on a commercial scale but were made for practice and pocket money by cooper's apprentices and as a 'spare time' occupation by ship's carpenters using off-cuts of wood to earn a little exra money. These old-time wooden tankards were often lined with pitch to stop leaks (Wood shrinks as it dries. Barrels need to be filled with water when not full of beer, or they'd fall apart. Similarly, Buckets used to be left down the well so that they would stay damp and tight. It's not really practical to keep tankards wet, so they were lined with pitch instead.)  If one of these pitch-lined tankards started to leak, it could usually be fixed by filling it with very hot water - this would partly re-melt the pitch and re-seal the leak. The other traditional way of sealing leaks is to ram dry straw or reed into the leaky joint, so that when the bucket is filled, the straw will swell and stop the leak.

Barrels were generally utilitarian objects of no great beauty, but some barrels would be used in more genteel surroundings (such as dining halls or officer's messes, and these might be bound with brass or copper hoops (so they could be polished, although gunpowder barrels were hooped with copper as a safety measure) and the heads (tops and bottoms) would be carved with the owner's coat-of-arms or regimental device. Tankards were even more unlovely, being made of scraps of offcuts and intended for the use of the poorest classes of people (anyone with pretentions to gentility would use a pewter tankard or something similar). The exceptions to this rule were when a cooper made a tankard for himself (he would want the tankard to advertise his skills) and when a tankard was made as a gift or presentation item. In such cases the tankards were polished and hooped with brass or copper. 

With the advent of cheap steel containers from the end of the nineteenth century, the craft of coopering went into decline and was virtually defuct by the nineteen-fifties. It now only survives in a few specialised niches. Whiskey for example improves when kept in oak casks, and some traditional breweries still keep beer in oak barrels. It seems likely that this will always require skilled coopers, since no machine has yet been developed that can make a wooden barrel so perfectly that it can hold liquids.