A short history of the barrel
Even the Romans gave up their beloved amphorae in favour of barrels. For centuries, barrels were the preferred containers for the transportation and storage of anything from wine to salted herring... even for dead people.
In the late 1800s, 30,000 coopers were rolling out the 18 million barrels a year required by the English beer industry. South of the English Channel, the French poured wine into another 10 million barrels, and on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, 7.5 million barrels were filled annually with American crude oil. Denmark exported 1.6 million casks of butter to the UK.
Global trade was already huge back then, and the barrel was king, with demand for the universal packaging of the time almost insatiable. Throughout the world, hundreds of thousands of coopers did nothing but make barrels, and still struggled to keep up with demand. Barrel making was an indispensable craft, and it paid well; coopers could become relatively wealthy from the demand for their trade.
Rum in barrels
The first historic account of barrels appears in 2700-year-old wall paintings from Ancient Egypt. But the bulging wooden container that we know today originated in ancient Gaul.
“In the vicinity of the Alps, they place their wines in wooden vessels to protect it against frost in the winter,” wrote Roman geographer and natural philosopher Pliny the Elder in the first century AD.
The barrels were rough compared with the elegant clay amphoras used by the Romans for wine, oil, and many other things. But if the burly Gallic wooden barrels lacked beauty, they were very durable and functional.
If a barrel took a fall, it didn’t break. With its rounded shape, it could be rolled, whereas an amphora had to be carried. Violent blows might make a barrel leak, but the damage was easy to repair. So once it was established that wine actually improved after storage for some time in a container made of oak, the Romans adopted the Gallic barrel. Ever more products were switched to wood when they were to be carried to remote destinations in the growing empire.
Barrels were subsequently divided into four main groups, with different purposes. Dry barrels were for the transportation of anything from salted fish to iron rivets. They were made of cheap
wood such as pine and fir, and often only used once, the equivalent of modern cardboard boxes.
Dry, sealed barrels were used for goods that did not tolerate moisture – such as flour, sugar or gunpowder.
‘White’ barrels were open containers such as tubs, buckets, and butter churns. They were often made of ash wood, and were indispensable in households, used especially in connection with the making of dairy products.
‘Wet’ barrels were the most expensive. They were made of old oak wood and had to be able to hold liquid without leaking. The oak casks boasted long durability; if treated well, such barrels could be used and re-used over 50-100 years.
Thousands of herring barrels
From the Roman Empire, barrel making spread across all of Europe. The Vikings used barrels, which are estimated to have reached Scandinavia in 200-400 AD. In the early days of their use, much of the population would have had barrel-making skills, but during the Middle Ages, the demand for barrels grew so big that they became a commodity, and their manufacture became a specialised profession.
In Scandinavia, it was the increasing trade in salted herring that particularly nourished the demand. Before the major herring market in late summer, hundreds of coopers were busy making the thousands of barrels required for the salting and packaging of the fish before they were carried to Southern Europe to be consumed instead of meat during the Lent of the following year.
The role of the cooper extended to the market place, where they were kept busy sealing the full barrels. This work had to be done carefully, as poor packaging could ruin a shipment, and became punishable by death. But the profit was worth the risk. Before and during the main market season, a hard-working barrel-maker could earn a year’s salary in one month.
Historians estimate that in good years, some 300,000 barrels of salted herring were shipped south, corresponding to 35,000 tonnes of fish. The carriage of such quantities of herring would have been impossible without the robust wooden barrels.
Coopers unionise
That particular market was declining by the 1400s, but the consumption of barrels kept on growing. There were plenty of other goods besides herring for which barrels provided the best packaging. Trade was thriving throughout Europe, and ever larger fleets of merchant ships carried thousands of barrels between ports along the coasts of the continents and on the major rivers.
Barrel-makers were sufficently numerous in cities that they began to unionise. Cooper associations were founded in many market towns, and they were given royal privileges, assisted in recognition by their value in being able to lay down common standards for barrel sizes.
“We must be masters of calculation and measuring, as how would we otherwise be able to determine the correct dimensions of the cask? Lord, my heart is leaping with joy when I see such a fine cask,” wrote the proud German master cooper Martin of Nuremberg in 1580.
Working as a barrel-maker was physically hard, not least for apprentices, as they were often beaten. One boy was so used to being beaten for small mistakes that after a day without a beating, he thought “that something was missing”. But there were great prospects for those who completed the apprenticeship. Unemployment was almost non-existent in the industry, and a cooper earned about three times as much as an ordinary worker. With hard work and good health, a barrel-maker could hope to end his days as a wealthy man.
Coopers set sail
Up until the 1400s, sea voyages were usually short and limited to coastal areas. But longer sea voyages of discovery soon made it necessary to bring larger quanti
ties of supplies, and the many barrels in a hold required constant watching and maintenance, so that their vital contents were not lost. Domingo Vizcaino was the cooper on the Santa Maria when Columbus crossed the ocean to the New World in 1492. About 300 years later, James Cook took two coopers and an apprentice on the HMS Endeavour during his first expedition to the Pacific, along with 250 barrels of beer, 44 barrels of brandy, 17 barrels of rum, and other for pork, beef, flour, salt, sauerkraut and more.
Sailors quickly discovered that alcohol could last longer than water, so wine and beer became the preferred drink of European explorers on their long journeys across the Atlantic and south of Africa. On Spanish and Portuguese ships, every sailor was entitled to 1.5 litres of wine a day, and in the English Navy the daily ration was a remarkable gallon of beer, or a lesser amount of spirits on longer journeys where beer might spoil – the origin of the famous Navy ‘rum ration’. In the 1600s, beer barrels took up one third of the space for supplies on the navy’s ships. In France, historian Jean Michel Deveau wrote that: “All major slave ships employ coopers. Their pay of 35-40 livres earns them an average position among navy officers.”
Conquerors and colonisers followed in the wake of the explorers. European empires spread across the world; shipping traffic grew, and global trade alongside it. The coopers were kept busy.
Barrels came in all sizes. The world’s biggest brewing vat was made in England in 1806. With a height of 10 metres, it could hold a million litres of beer.
Barrels roll off
With the discovery of oil in the US in the late 1800s, the demand for oil barrels initially exploded, but the rise of machines and new materials soon began to erode many of the traditional practices. Coopers themselves began to use machines to increase their output; between 1844 and 1883 more than 400 barrel-making machine patents were granted in the US alone. The first machines were unreliable, and in some cases lethal to their operators, but gradually the technology improved, and ever more manual tasks were replaced by more efficient mechanical solutions. By the late 1800s their production had become mechanised to such an extent that the cost of a barrel had fallen to a sixth of its mid-century price. Then demand plummeted as barrels were challenged by cardboard boxes and metal drums. Coopering had all but disappeared by the mid-1920s.
Today, traditional drum barrels are made primarily for the alcohol industry, with much of the production taking place in France, where 500,000 oak crates are produced annually. This employs only 400 people. As with so many crafts, industrialisation has made an artisan niche out of a once great global profession.