"The Long History of the Art of Barrel Making" presented by John Cox.

[Music] this evening we're going to be blessed by local hifalonian John Cox who's been here for 20 years and actually runs his own Cooperage and he is going to give us the long history of the art of barrel it's very fascinating but anyway John Cox everyone thanks Kate thanks everybody hi my name is John Cox I'm a Cooper I have a Cooperage here in High Falls before I start I just want to thank Bill and Dave and Bill's crew isn't this place beautiful have you guys been here yet you did a great job let's hear it for the d h Canal guys it's a great addition to the town and I'm so proud to talk here tonight thanks Bill this is my company quercus and uh I make barrels and tanks right up in the Mohonk Arts Building many of you know we're putting the fun back in super fund up there and uh and uh the coopering is one of the ancient trades the Sawyers sod the Millers milled and the Coopers uh made Cooper joinery do you hold water and other Goods uh we see it all throughout the world we see it in Japan we see it in Europe and South America the Coopers would make the vessels there are three different type of Coopers there's the wet Cooper which is what I do I hold liquid we have the dry Cooper who makes slack barrels you would see like Rosendale cement and a slack Barrel Cooperage there's also the white Cooper and they made all the culinary instruments you would need there would have been a white Cooper right here in town so if you needed a bowl or a bucket or a spoon or a ladle you would go to your white Cooper for that uh the barrels we're going to talk today about barrels and tanks and the barrels have a wonderful lexography to them not only their names but our lexicon has so many words derived from the barrel and the tank and we're going to talk about those today you can see some of them here this is the ton of the French Barrel the ton is where we get the term ton in fact we still measure oil in tons and barrels we see the butt here and that is where we get the word but uh that's where it is it doesn't really look like a butt but all of you on that Barrel have a bunghole right in the middle that's right it's called that we'll talk more about that later we have the punchin the hog head the tears the barrel the rundlet there's a kilnerkin the Firkin which is what I make a little bit larger than this and the pin the Firkin is Dutch for quarter it's a quarter of a barrel and the pin is a half of a Firkin half of a quart and that's where we get the terms court and pint from these small barrels our ancestors use barrels and tanks for everything without it they wouldn't have been able to live drink eat explore conquer Warfare colonization industrialization it all relied heavily and on the tank and the barrel I'm going to talk about that in my talk today for the first half and the second half I'm going to talk about the process of how I make coopered vessels up at the shop [Applause] coopering is the ma is the art of making a polygon using different pieces this is a four-sided polygon here the square and uh Cooper joinery relies on oh that might uh these angles here so uh this is four pieces if I put four pieces into a circle of 360 if I divide four into 360 I get 90 degrees I can make a four-sided polygon using 90 degree Cuts with two small pieces and two larger pieces if I take that number and I divide by two I get 45. so if I want to make a four-sided shape I cut 45 degree angles there does that make sense to everybody yes uh so what's that so uh four in the 360 divided by two is very rudimentary formula and you have Cooper joinery all over your house where you have picture frames here this is a six-sided and a six into 360 divided by two would give us a 30 degree angle if we extrapolate that through barrels and tanks this Barrel has 25 staves if I divide 25 into 316 divide by 2 I get the angle this Frame is not going to work if the angle is 42 degrees it's not going to work if it's 46 degrees foreign you can see here how tight the staves are with most Coopers there's no glue or screws and you can see how tight the seam is here on the staves this is a barrel Stave Stave is plural for staff same way leaves are plural for leaf our ancestors used to keep animals at Bay with a stick we still call that staving off we Stave off infection we Stave off bankruptcy by holding a stick at it here we see water towers on the upper west side hot tubs silos this is brought to my attention by my dear friend dick Stokes early on in my research I dick pointed out that the silos were very much similar to the barrel and led me down making the tanks that I make thanks sick this is a glue up for a column you can see here the staves there's 25 staves here glued up this would be put on a lathe and turned into a column right there so coopering is used in many different facets of woodworking this is a small rudimentary Barrel this is called the pigeon and this would be used on collecting maple syrup I believe that's from like the 13th century you can see the wooden bands and I'll talk to you about those a little bit more you can see this handle the one Stave would have an extended handle to hold it these are very small but there are very large barrels and tanks this is in France this is one of the largest barrels in the world you can see similar to a silo the Ring's holding it and there's a person there just to give you an idea of how large that is so the history of the barrel goes all the way back to Julius Caesar the Roman Empire as they're marching across and defeating the Gauls they come across these simple iron barrels they were dragging wine across there in these clay amphoras you can see this little nipple here that that would go into the sand and the soldiers needed wine so they would drag these M4 across but like I said when they met the Gauls and served them they realized and used the technology of barrel making we see it in here by the second century the Romans are using barrels um and this is um from 300 A.D 220 a second these are as I talked about those we wouldn't have exploration or any kind of nautical Warfare they needed potable water they needed food on the boat and these simple rudimentary barrels were pulled out of a Viking ship that they found they were from pretty good shape Caesar and the Roman Empire leave the French area but they introduced wine and grapes to the Bordeaux region and the wine making continued to make there we see this these are some large butts right here as you can see in the barrel the there's wooden spikes there what was called the spig it's where we get the term spigot and French it was a faucet it's where we get the term faucet and it was very important and very difficult to retrieve water and liquid from the barrel and be able to close it back up again large barrels like this were kept only by Lords and aristocracy and they would be kept in The Buttery this would usually be in the basement or in a separate building the butts were kept here in The Buttery and the one important person to the Lord was the man who go down and retrieve wine and pour it from the butts and that man became known as the butler by Elizabethan times we see that he's head of household but that's where the term originates happening in the East we see in Japan they're making small tanks and barrels here uh Hokusai who we know from the wave illustration that was from his Mount Fiji series and you can see Fiji in the middle of the barrel there and this gentleman here making a large cask they don't use steel or wood they use braided bamboo that they split and weave into a braid and it's almost like a steel cable at that point you can see how large the mallets are there that they are hammering them down with this is the Battle of Orleans this is about the 14th century this depiction here is the first time we see a cannon being used in Warfare the Cannons uh the Metallurgy at the time did not allow them to cast a metal pipes so they would use metal staves and line the outside with steel like this small these are called bomb vests and you can see the staves here and we still use that as the barrel of a gun and that's where that term comes from the barrel this brings us to Johannes Kepler he was one of the first astronomers he was the first to separate astrology and astronomy he's known as the father of calculus and one of those reasons is from this book that he wrote the Nova starmetria delorium vineorium or the new geometry of the wine barrel during Kepler's second marriage at the end when he was paying the wine merch and he felt like he was getting ripped off Kepler asked the Man how he measured the barrel and when the man showed him that he put two sticks in it Kepler couldn't believe that that's how he measured it so being a student of Archimedes he decided he figured out how to find the volume and interior of a barrel and from this we see the birth of calculus measuring barrels is something our ancestors went through and were troubled with for hundreds of years if I told you this was six gallons or if I told you was four gallons you have no way to really know and I can rip you off if I sold you four gallons of beer or six gallons of beer in a four gallon barrel so it's very hard for merchants and other people especially who want to do excise tax on these products to figure out how much volume was in these barrels this brings us the age of Discovery and nautical exploration and trade relied heavily on the barrel this is a picture from the Dutch Trading Company you can see how the boats were made Flat so they could roll the barrel onto them most battles were sent down in stacks of staves that was used as a ballast and then the barrels would be constructed by the Coopers right there on the beach head and filled the barrels would be rolled into those boats and then brought out to the main ships [Applause] we can see here more flat Barrel this is called the Durham boat and it was used to move the barrels around here we are at the Mayflower you can see a cross section of it there was barrels of food there was barrels of water if this was a warship there would also be barrels of gunpowder without barrels they wouldn't be able to survive nautical law said that ships couldn't Sail Without a Cooper and the Mayflower was three weeks late leaving because they didn't have a Cooper on board they finally found a young man by the name of John Alden there he is there he's America's first Cooper he's also one of the longest living Mayflower residents some of his ancestors include Orson Welles Marilyn Monroe Longfellow Adams Dick Van Dyke without the Cooper we wouldn't have Mary Poppins Citizen Kane and Marilyn Monroe this brings us to the Jamestown Settlement in 1604 we see records that they were using pipe staves they were using pipe staves to irrigate water off of the James River here is a very rudimentary Stave pipe you can see the pieces there sometimes they were actually whole logs that had been hold through these Dave pipes are very important as we explored West we needed to bring water to areas we couldn't get to so men would build large Stave pipes is very similar to a silo it's just on its side you can see there the staves are being staggered as they build it was easy for a burrow or mule to bring this wood up onto a hill so they could build these pipes and bring water where they needed you can see here as my friend dick pointed out that the the silos and wooden staves are held with what's called an allen shoe they also call it a lug this allowed them to tighten the staves and if you drive by an old Silo you'll see these in a water tower this brings us to Aaron Burr sir a bear was commissioned to start the Manhattan company and the Manhattan company was made to help fight yellow fever and to put better water pipes into New York City he did this with Hamilton they were Partners at the time with the Manhattan company there was a there was a byline in the charter that the Manhattan company could start its own business if it wanted or any Enterprises and Burr started the Manhattan Bank this caused a Schism between him and Hamilton one that they never were able to make up on the Manhattan Bank still survives it became the Manhattan Chase Bank became the JP Morgan Chase bank and now it's just the Chase Bank does anybody here bank with Chase you do in your pocket is a debit card and on that debit card is the chase logo and it's a stylized wooden pipe that they hearken back to their Origins and Aaron Burr I want to talk about some of the industries that relied on barrels one of them was the naval stores industry there were no stores per se it was more about storage and boats in the 17th and 18th century couldn't sail there was no epoxy there was no glue there was no paint so they relied on resins and oils from longneedled Pines this would be refined in large wooden tanks and boiled down there's some tar barrels here England was having a problem they were having a problem with Palantine Germans and they were having a problem because Russia cut them off from the pine and tar that they needed Queen Anne sent 20 ships up the Hudson to where the Livingston's lived to try to harvest those trees to get resin they also sent 20 ships down to North Carolina the trees here at Claremont where they had the Work Camp were not the right trees those Germans settled nearby and what we now know is Germantown in North Carolina it was the right tar and there was quite a business down there of making tar and we still call them the North Carolina Tar Heels and it's from this Naval stores industry it's one of the early seals of New York it shows how important the barrel was we see a Dutch Trader we see an Indian the pelts that were used the beaver pelts and then two barrels right there this brings us back to Jamestown excuse me in the tobacco industry by 1619 tobacco is thriving in Jamestown and they're relying heavily on two things they're relying on the barrel and chatteral slavery for the next 300 years those two items would be intertwined through American Colonization and Industry you can learn more about that in the 1619 project if anybody's interested or has heard about it all the industries that I show relied heavily on both of those items they were traded and shipped the same way side by side in the bottom of a dank boat and it was part of a triangle of trade that included slavery barrels and molasses from the Caribbean to Africa to here in America you can see here the tobacco was packed in these large Hogs heads this is tobacco that would have came out of them that was stacked in there the hog heads could also have an axle be put through it and can be rolled up by horse as you can see there this is a paper making tub this was a lithograph I think from the 17th century that somebody brought me it was a paper maker and he had me make him a uh a paper making he makes frames of Pulp in there to make paper this is a cross-section of Captain Cook's boat do I have my glasses sorry at this point well Captain Cook over 2 million men had died from scurvy Sailors Sailors are riddled with scurvy you can see here they were even afraid they didn't know what was going on and they were afraid to even go to land and they would have people bring them buckets and barrels of fruit by the 1800s they realized that it's Citrus that the men need and one commonplace to get that if they were in the Mediterranean was the island of Sicily in 1837 they had 740 battles by 1850 it explodes to 20 000 barrels of lemons were coming out of Seattle the Sicilian farmers were overwhelmed by this they were getting robbed they needed protection they needed help with distribution and they hired local soldiers to help them with this local Mafi these Mafi helped them to protect and distribute it we see them a few years later moving here to America to big cities like Boston New York Rhode Island Philadelphia my Sicilian ancestors landed and they brought those skills that they had with them here to the states and uh but we can thank the barrows of lemons for the birth of the Sicilian Mafia this brings us to the whaling industry as you can see there on the bottom the barrels the Coopers are filling the barrels the blubber is being melted right there in the ton and brought down and filled into the barrel the men had to be very careful if they bung the barrel too quick the pressure and heated oil inside would explode scalding everyone nearby there's some barrels of wailing oil this is from the USS Constitution uh men on boats then didn't have individual water so they all had to go to the same place to get the water it would be a large barrel like this that we know is a butt and nautical terms to make a hole in something is called the Scuttle it so the men would meet around the scuttled butt talk about the captain and the chef and that's what we get is the original water cooler so next time you hear somebody say what's all the scuttlebutt it's from them gathering around the original water cooler this brings us to the Livingston's and Robert Livingston and his son Chancellor Livingston if you allow me to talk about them for a moment as we said Robert's father had told Queen Anne to send the Palatine Germans up to put them in the work camps and even though that didn't work out they were still very powerful and they were given what was called the Hardenburg tract I'm in a room full of historians I don't need to tell you that but it included the cat skills it also included the other side of the river Claremont and areas like Kingston Robert Livingston would start a gun powder Factory using barrels and it helped us win the Revolutionary War England had cut us off from saltpeter and we were not able to make our own gun powder there's a gunpowder Barrel there gunpowder would be kept on boats and small barrels like this uh on the during the war they would usually have a leather flap over the end of the barrel that was to keep the Sparks out as one man ran around helping load the cannon fire this is chancellor Livingston he inherits his grandfather and his father's land and they opened a large Sawmill not too far from here the Dutch had already had one that Sawmill grows and they see what a big industry they have and the timber that's coming out of the Catskills the Glasgow glass company comes nearby because they need Birch for their forges and Chancellor Livingston has a very large Cooperage the town that built up around this industry is known as Woodstock and his Cooperage sat on the lake that supplies Kingston water then we know is Cooper's Lake there it is there there was a large Coop Ridge right there Livingston's a fascinating character he's one of the five people that writes the Declaration of Independence when Franklin gets ill they send him to France to broker the Louisiana Purchase which he does while he's there he meets a young inventor by the name of Robert Fulton who told him he can get his Goods up and down the Hudson a lot quicker and the two of them start a steamboat company they build it right there in Claremont named the first boat after Claremont from his ancestral home and for 18 years Livingston and Fulton run not only Monopoly on the Hudson but because he brokered Louisiana Purchase he gave himself the only access to the Mississippi Delta and for 18 years the two of them ran the Hudson River and the Mississippi you could not have a steamboat on either if it wasn't one of theirs our our anti-monopoly laws were written just to break up this Monopoly of these two men some of the things that have been going up and down the Hudson was salted Meat and Fish they were pulling sturgeon out of the water I believe they call that Albany beef you told me that bill yeah they would pack the barrels with salt a lot of food industry is obviously relied on the barrel this is the Tallow industry which is a rendered animal fat that was used these are some great tanks from Austria you can see the men there mixing sauerkraut I know that looks photoshopped but I've actually talked to someone in Austria on Instagram and they are real the balsamic vinegar industry relies heavily on barrels especially barrels of different woods and while the vinegar is refined as it goes through the different types there's some barrels of olive oil in Portugal [Applause] these are flower barrels on the Erie Canal just like the d h canal and the Erie Canal they're removing a lot of barrels especially what we talked about earlier slack barrels you can see here the bundle of staves that they had most cooperages were assembly plants the staves were being milled somewhere else and you can see them making slack flower barrels there these barrels were paper lined this is a slack Stave cutter this is a rotating saw and as the wood was moved in it would cut almost a curved shingle off the wood would go over and they would keep passing it through that blade to cut those are some examples of some flower barrels John Alden remember his name earlier from the first Cooper in Minneapolis they're making about 10 million barrels by 1894. the flower barrels those are different from what you make right now yeah so I make wet yeah they're slack barrels it's much thinner I have some pictures and there's actually some here they're very thin and they used everything from Nails pelts glass flour the Rosendale cement these were all in slack barrels strong they didn't need to be as strong it was really just a vessel to hold it they didn't have sheet Goods at the time to make boxes but before we go there these were also bound with wooden Hoops there used to be one here and those wooden Hoops were made by local people especially here called hoopers they were farmers and during the summer the all these Hills had been denuded and the saplings That Grew they would cut them and slide them down the mountains into lakes and during the winter they would make Hoops they would use a draw knife like this on a draw bench and split the saplings and make hoops they were taking the towns like Rosendale cement a large Patrician company that was making cement Rosendale cement did not want to be in the barrel making business so the hoopers would come and barter for goods and services using the Hoops there in Rosendale records show in 1881 alone 45 million wooden Hoops were made in this area then they strike oil in Titusville in 1856 and the minute they do that they need a lot of barrels there's nothing else to put this oil in they need barrels and tanks here's an oil field I believe this isn't uh Pennsylvania you can see these large tanks here filled with oil there's a very messy and dangerous thing to do these tanks would often catch on fire and it could be very hard to get water to extinguish those does anybody have any idea how you would put out a burning tank of oil huh remember this is America there's a hint they would shoot at him they had cannons around the oil fields if one of the tanks would catch on fire the cannon was aimed and would blast a hole in the bottom of the tank draining the tank and eventually extinguishing the fire this brings us to John D Rockefeller he not only wanted to make all the oil but he wanted to make all the barrels we talked about before how it was a problem he standardized the barrel size at 42 gallons they call it the American Standard Barrel from Rockefeller is running the largest Coop Ridge in the Ohio Valley many other cooperages around it this is the Stevens and Heisman Cooperage many Industries grew up around this petroleum we have paint and glues PPG Pittsburgh Paint is there in that area so there's a huge need for barrels and Cooperage if you recognize that name Heisman you might know it if you play football the Heisman Trophy that was named after John Heisman right and that is him right here that's heisman's son Johnny would go on to a football career and you can almost imagine him holding a small Barrel as he's running um this is Matthew Vassar I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the industries without getting too much into them like the beer industry Matthew Vassar and his brother have a large Brewery over in Wappingers Falls they're making and selling 50 000 barrels a year going down the Hudson these breweries would have large tanks such as these for storage rats they would also be cooling the beer here that's an ice house above its barrels and tanks you see all the ice and below it are the tanks keeping it cool is a shot from the Guinness Brewery the French wine industry obviously relies heavily on the barrel and we talked about the ton this picture shows both metal hoops and wooden Hoops that were being used there in fact then so if you go to some Vineyards today you still see them using the wooden hoops and they use that for a reason the wooden Hoops still have organic matter in them and they attract the bugs to keep them away from the sugar that's coming out of the bunghole and heads it's a way to distract them uh if anybody has ever lived in England and had a pickup truck you know that the back there is called the 2-0 and that's a two no cover to know is French for barrel and the reason it's called the 2-0 covers because the early cards the back seats were just scooped out barrels that they would put on top of the frame obviously the whiskey industry relies heavily on the barrel currently there are 7.5 million barrels just in Kentucky brings us to Rosendale cement and the cement industry we talked about before about the hoopers each of these barrels would go down to the city with anywhere between 6 and 12 Hoops on them it was a paper line Barrel the barrel will be chopped up when it got down there and just burned but the men would get about 10 cents a barrel bill I believe this is from the museum do you remember where this picture is from Bill Lawrenceville uh if you ever been to East Kingston or the pawn chaki area that was also another Patrician uh cement Town there's an old headline saying the staves are coming and the men will be back at work they can make cement all day long but without the barrels to put them in they couldn't ship anything this is not too far from where I grew up in Philadelphia if you've ever been to Philadelphia this is a shot from Penn's Landing that's the Theodore Apple Cooperage they weren't just Cooperage they were gaugers too and the gaugers were measuring the barrel size and and what was inside of it for excise taxes and tariffs and it was a large industry as we said it was very hard to determine how big this Barrel is and how much was in it here's some barrels from the museum you can see here with the wooden slats [Applause] you can see them tapered and pinned here with a nail the nail would be bent over to hold it and there these saplings were fresh and wet and as they shrunk they constricted and tightened the barrel even more it was a big business at the turn of the century here's an ad for the Quaker City Cooperage for slack barrels they're looking for wood and Stave material I have a huge book of just add after ad of this The Cooperage industry not only made barrels and tanks but it made Cooperage making Machinery this here is the slack Joiner in order to prove that the inventive Genius of the American people has not yet reached the limits of its possibility we present the Rochester slack Barrel Steve jointer terribly dangerous looking machine this brings us to Ann Tyler Edison I'd like to talk about her for a moment in 1904 there was a World's fair up in Buffalo and Daredevil and stunts were quite popular at the time and a 42 year old woman decided to go over the falls in a barrel of her own making no one had ever done it before she designed the spiral here with a weight on the bottom and a pillow here we see Anne here and lied about her age she was actually 62. this is the shot of the two Psychopaths who nailed her into that Barrel one can only imagine over the deafening noise of the Fall yelling and it's time to go and they pushed her over the falls as we said it was just Anne and a pillow but Dan had one other thing in the barrel if you were going to go over the Barrel in a Falls uh what would you put in the barrel and do you have any ideas what you'd put in the barrel with you bottle of Scotch some rum no she put a cat in there with her she went over the Falls of the cat makes sense and survived the trip over the falls as the actual Barrel that she would tour with later her manager stole it from her but that her and the cat many people did it after and some lived some didn't but she was the first we start to see the fall of the barrel during the Industrial Revolution if you've ever been to the Dumbo neighborhood in Brooklyn it was called the Robert Gare company they did not invent corrugated cardboard but they propagated it through the states prohibition did not help the Coopers either this is Nelly Bly some of you might heard she was a famous muckraker she committed herself into an asylum for a few days and wrote about it I the name of the book escapes me at the moment but she later on became an industrialist and in a final death penal to the barrel she patented the steel drum uh that I'm going to talk now about my process and how I make the barrel um my company is called quercus as they said I'm a Cooper did I say that as I'm 5'6 I'm known as a Mini Cooper and uh um name my company's corkus that's Latin for Oak quercus Alabama white oak Red Oak the problem with making a barrel is that the pore structure of the wood is such that if I just cut Flats on wood the water would Leach right out of the barrel by cutting the wood at quartersawn I'm putting the pores on a tangent across the front of The Stave in White Oak you've seen this before in arts and crafts Furniture these are called medullary Rays White Oak is about 38 percent medullary Ray and in those rays are something called tyloses there's small tissue like almost balloons and in the same way Our arteries get clogged as the tree grows the thylosi swells and stops the water from moving through the pores and that's why white oak is the main wood used for barrels you're not going to see really a mahogany Barrel God bless you or a birch Barrel it's white oak because of the high content of tyloses you can see here is one of my staves now it looks like the grain is going this way but this is actually the grain running here you can see it's across the front if the grain was there the liquid would just Leach straight from the barrel I Mill my staves here we talked about that mathematical process before my Barrel Steve like that one there is 25 staves 25 and the 360 divided by two gives me my angle this Stave here has a bilge in the middle as you can see it goes from about two inches to three back to two and you can see this here in the barrel it gives this Barrel its bilge here in the middle this is a tank here that I make and we saw them there in the water towers and the pipes and the silos this is straight if we can imagine an American football and unstitch it what we have are four pieces of leather that leather is almost like a wide diamond and as we stitch that leather together we start to get a shape that resembles a barrel in fact if this continued it almost looked like a football if I took the same four pieces of leather and they were rectangles and stitched them together I would have a tube or a tank so to get a straight tank I put no bilge in The Stave but for a barrel I do put the bilge the bilge is very important we talked about nautical Commerce and trade one man or woman could roll a 900 pound Barrel on the bilge pivot the barrel roll it up some planks onto a boat it was very easy to move a 900 pound crate is much harder for people to move and lift around especially without sheep Goods or large Rift wood so the barrel was able to move around very easily by bunghole reamer we talked about the Mayflower and John Alden to access water or food which is what the Cooper did on the boat he needed to be able to get into the barrel and be able to close it back up again that boat was filthy and disgusting and if he just dug a hole into the barrel all that filth would go into it this shaft allows me to taper the bunghole while the dirt and wood that's coming up into this shaft stopping it from going into the barrel once I've raised the barrel here into what the French call the Mison Rose I'm creating a barrel I need to now steam it one of the hard parts of opening a coop Ridge is not only an sap quarter sun White Oak but it has to be air dried White Oak the wood that I use like for this Barrel was dried outside for three years this brought the moisture content down without any cracking and allowed some of the tannins to get flushed out of the wood if I made a barrel out of new Oak it would be completely astringent like making tea with 10 tea bags so we air dry it and the wood if you can imagine wood is a bundle of straws and those bundles of straws are held together with a gelatinous material called lignin it's why when you take a new branch and try to snap it you can the lignin is soft and allows the wood to move if I bought wood that I would use as a cabinet maker it would be Kiln dry that would have gone into a kiln and dried at 600 Degrees crystallizing that lignin that's why your table doesn't warp that's why the door doesn't cup because it's been in Kiln I'm talking to some Woodworkers here not to look at them yes but if it's only been air dry that lignin hasn't been crystallized and allows me to bend the wood and I do that by steaming the barrel for about 45 minutes wetting the wood I steam it loosening the lignin allowing me to bend the wood this is a gentleman at the Guinness plant he's steaming the wood with a steam Bell and a nice Tweed suit once that is done I am able to bend the wood we talked about stitching that football together so if I start with that Mison Rose shape and come in and pull it together just like stitching the football I will get a symmetrical shape right you can see here these are my working Hoops as you can see on this Barrel this has Barrel rings on it but when I'm making my Barrel I'm using these thick tapered working hoops here's one of the Rings here when the hoops come off I put the ring on this ring has a cant to it an angle it's actually a conical section this is bent along with my working Hoops allowing it to sit nicely on the wood once this is done I'm ready to toast the barrel my clients who are whiskey makers want the barrel toasted and charred so I toast the barrel two things are happening I'm toasting and I'm setting the lignin I'm hardening the lignin in the barrel so that The Stave stays curved but I'm also toasting the sugar we talked about those straws they're filled with cellulose and hemicellulose sugars and by toasting that I'm adding some sugar profiles to what will go in there later I then Char the barrel I introduced 1300 degrees in the barrel using compressed air creating a cyclone of fire in the barrel this gives me a charred interior my clients asked me for a light Char a dark Char and this is why your whiskey is brown the whiskey is moonshine when it goes in it's clear and my charred interior is what gives its flavor and its taste if you can imagine toasting a marshmallow that first passed gets you that yellow nice color that's the toasted aspect and if you take that marshmallow and then Char it you get that nice black coating on the outside we're doing the same to the interior of the barrel another tricky part this is the chime and the crows and this is where the head sits into the barrel Stave if I have a water balloon and I poke a hole in that balloon all the water comes out of that balloon if that same pinhole is in my barrel all the liquid will come out so it's very important to get this cut right you can see there with the help of some of the Woodworkers in this room I modernize some of my woodworking Machinery that I had existing to help me cut the chime in the crows and when my blades are sharp and everything is clean it looks very tight almost like one piece of wood but you can see the difference in the staves there and then ready to put the head into the barrel I open up and take off those working Hoops as it opens up I'm able to put the head into the barrel and then I put my rings on it this is a shot from my shop these are barrels when they're done this is the Stout Ridge Vineyard and distillery in Marlboro he has over 300 of my barrels and some of my large tanks you can see them here if you ever get a chance to go down the Marlboro to check out Steve and stout Ridge Vineyard it's really wonderful I also make large tanks called washbacks this is what they ferment their wart in and as we talked about and saw before these large tanks here's my hoop with my lugs this is Douglas fir this is a neutral wood as opposed to the Yoke which introduces tannins and sugars the fur is neutral and allows them to create their own biome in there to ferment in I have them all over these are in Detroit we have a bunch in Seattle and New Jersey and Philly and you can see him there stirring the wart when the pandemic hit my distiller stopped distilling they started making hand sanitizer I tried to get them as smart as I could I tried to get him to age that in barrels but they wouldn't do it uh so I took the same technology and thought process and we started making a wooden Hot Tubs here in the area come by the shop you never know who you might see up there that's bill and one of the reasons I got into this was because the American distiller is federally mandated to use new charred Oak Barrels in 1933 the Coopers Union lobbied Congress and they while they were standardizing whiskeys there's nine whiskeys you're legally allowed to make here in the U.S and six of them must be aged and they knew charred Oak Barrel when I got into this in 2015 it's because there was a barrel crisis where were you for the barrel crisis I read an article in Times magazine most of you are old enough here to remember that it was a magazine and uh and it was an article about the barrel shortage and what was going on in Kentucky where they were making most of the barrels they were ignoring what was happening here in New York and in Washington with the craft whiskey movement those people just like Jack Daniels were federally mandated for new barrels and when I got in there was a two-year wait for Barrow so if you opened a Distillery you were gonna have to wait two years to get barrels to store it and that eventually calmed down but now with the pandemic we're back in a barrel crisis again it's affecting not only American whiskey industry with the American wine industry there's a large shortage of cooperages and Coopers I'm one of 28 cooperages left in America and I'm one of only three that make them by hand most of them are automated with the largest one making 2400 barrels a day there's three shifts each shift makes 800 barrels and so it's big business in Kentucky as we said you can find out more about me online on Instagram or uh um at quercus Cooperage and I wanted to open up for questions if anybody had any questions yes ma'am you get your Oak uh-huh oh yeah I skipped that yeah so um I started woodworking as a teenager in South Philadelphia I met people like Michael over here and I was doing it for about 25 26 years I just shop with Josh Finn up here on the hill let me know Josh and uh but it was a lot of chemicals and I was sick of the chemicals so when I learned that there was a barrel crisis I bought a few barrels and took them apart to try to reverse engineer it and try to figure out the Codex of why this was like this and like I said my meddling woodworking friends helped me and after two years of research and development I held water for the first time uh Steve at Stout Ridge wanted to use my barrels he wanted something unique and my wood is local I get most of it from Tri-State that you drive by there on 209 I also work with a Stave Mill in Pennsylvania because it's Quarters on many of you seen people Milling wood and they do it like this with a large slab that's a flat cut and I can't use that wood I need the wood to be cut Quarters on it's a very different ways set up to saw the wood and these Stave Mills can cut a tree down they're just a toothpick left of quartersawn wood and they Supply Industries like myself yeah I know how long does it take you to make a barrel yeah everybody asked me this I know you uh well with my Machinery in my shop I can make about Five Barrels a week if I had better machinery and better things but and that's fine I don't want to become a barrel Factory I like my spot I am like a traditional Cooperage you can come get tanks from me when the pandemic hit I switched into the culinary work these are fermenting tanks for shoyu and soy sauce I make things based around Koji if anybody that it's a fermented rice so I'm able to Pivot with the hot tubs and The Culinary in the barrel instead of just making 30 whiskey barrels a week and because my competitors are only making whiskey barrels it gives me a nice Lane to do custom work people call me from anything from beer folders I have someone in the Nova Scotia who uses them for pickled herring I make a cabinet that I've sent all over the world Austria to Australia we just sent one to the sultanate of Oman so it allows me I like the lane that I'm in where I'm not just cranking out whiskey barrels yeah yes sir your picture showed a traditional versus a modern border sewing yes the difference and Why did Why was it changed oh yeah so um well traditionally it was cut in a very even manner but when they do a quarter song I'm getting slabs that are anywhere between three inches an inch and a half so I'm getting varieties of of width and if you notice on the barrel there are some wider staves there are some smaller staves and it's just a more efficient way to cut the log Quarters on as opposed to trying to get uniform staves every time it gives me a lot of waste yeah anybody else yes ma'am can you shake the Angles and the Bulge oh yes I have Machinery that does both at the same time it shapes the angle and I have a machine that cuts the staves and it follows a pattern I can make any pattern I want this one comes out with the bilge and comes back in and cuts the angle on the edge of The Stave there yeah and I can direct that angle depending on that yes Michael yes yes no it looks like that because of the ring but it does have a uh uh yes um when we saw with the silos and the Hoops those can be tightened manually because it's a flat tank where the barrel the bilge gives us another advantage and then I can bang the Hoops down against the bilge it acts as a clamp squeezing this together and actually squeezing the head together on some of those large tanks you saw they were tapered to the bottom so The Stave would be thin and then get thicker and this allows us to tighten the Rings by hammering as opposed to manual tightening on a tank or a silo yes sir some Cooper Jews use five-year aged it's really washed a lot of the tannins out and I think to me it's a little bit dead I think three years is a nice sweet spot but yes you could make a barrel out of older Oak but it's just for my clients they're trying to get a flavor imparted and the three year is a nice spot for the sugars yeah and one thing that I'm seeing like when my parents live down in Maryland is a lot of a lot of oak trees dying from the climate issue down there yeah yeah and and things to standing dead and rotting and turning in the firewood and I'm like that doesn't seem right to you yeah you know what the uh the way we Harvest timber in this country is is very much scattered and scavenger-like as opposed to in France where they auction off the forests every year a Napoleon and the secretary of the Navy realized they needed Oak for warships so they cordoned off the forests into different regions and every year you bid at auction for a portion of that Forest where here in America it's mostly a public land that people are Scavenging from yeah you know um so The Woodworking industry and the coopering industry get about 15 percent of the annual Oak that is milled and harvested can anybody uh know what the other 85 percent goes to with a white oak 85 of the White Oak that's harvested annually goes to make one product and I'll give you a hint everything in your house has been on this product yes hey nobody ever gets ballots you're gonna get a free Barrel 85 percent of the annual Oak that is milled mostly because it's knotted is used for pallets The Woodworking industry the flooring industry and the coopering industry gets the the sweeter wood without any of the imperfections yes sir this is Douglas fir you might know that wood from two by fours this is called clear fur there's no knots and this is a traditional fermenting barrel if you've ever been to Scotland and saw their large tanks they're using Douglas fir as I talked about before it's neutral so this has a lot of tannins that introduce a lot of flavor to your beard Your Whiskey when they're fermenting say a soy sauce or even a pickled herring they don't want the introduction of all those tannins into the flavor profile so this gives them a neutral biome yeah it's also Cypress is also commonly used but we don't have too much of it around here so I can get this fur really nice locally yeah you know you won't need a quick salad or do you use other species whale also I only use quercus Alba I can't use red oak because it doesn't have the tyloses content I could use French Oak but I don't have access to it there's also a Japanese Oak that has a lot of leaking issues and that is very desirable but for what I can get here in America at his white oak when they came over here and found our White Oak in the forests here they found that they could saw the wood in France they still split a French White Oak can only be split but here they like the American White Oak because it actually can be sawn no and this is an issue because I can't get wood from certain people who are telling me they're giving me oak are going to give me about 10 Chestnut Oak I can't identify that when it comes in I can only identify it my client calls me and says the stave's leaking and it's leaking because I put a Chestnut Oak Stave in there so I have to be really careful of where I'm getting the wood and the not use Chestnut Oak yeah yes person directly stand correctly that in order to put the top on it you pop the ring off and then it opens up enough for you to yes yeah I used to have a slide I didn't have it yeah so when the working hoop comes up it splays open just enough for us to tap our head in and when that happens to a barrel that's already aged like that one just has enough spring in it a little bit you really have to loosen all the Rings for them to open up like that but for the newer Construction in sections or is it a singular piece that you've already got it as a purple circle oh no the top starts as a square blank and then I cut it into a circle and the heads and the barrels I use a shaper machines and this is very dangerous to put wood into a shaper I'm introducing 25 unglued pieces of wood into the shaper the head has eight pieces that are all unglued that shaper doesn't want me to introduce anything to it let alone unglued wood so I built a series of Jigs and steel holders I also have machines that give me a lot of pneumatic press to hold it down while I cut it yeah okay and finally um is there anything about swelling you have to yes absolutely uh yes I all my clients know to swell the barrel for 48 hours um the barrel is designed to be wet it's designed to have liquid in it once it doesn't so this has a high moisture content this wood it's probably about 20 percent to 18 percent uh where furniture makers are around what 12 13 percent a little lower this wood will try to get down to 12 if it dries out when that happens these Rings start to slide off it's almost if you lost a lot of weight and your pants fall down this makes the barrel very uneasy and very hard to sort of move around so it's important once they get the barrel to fill it and keep it swelled I'm relying on the swelling to keep my rings tight just like the boat builder who's relying on the external pressure of the boat I'm relying on the inside the boat Builders keep the water out and we the Coopers hold the water in and so I get stealing a roll my nicest machine in the shop is this Slovenian hoop roller and it has a it has what's that yeah like our like our poor ex first lady the Slovenian ring roll it rolls the Rings and it puts a curve onto it it was a great day wasn't it um it was a uh it puts this cant on it it rolls the steel not only into the circle but onto this to our measurements we then punch two holes we take another measurement and then we actually bang the rivets by hand and when I say we I mean my assistant Santiago uh we bang these rivets here and flatten them it's soft and yield steel and we make all of our Rings ourselves uh here you can see the rivets here on my tank yeah so when I get quarters on Lumber I can get anything from five inches all the way to an inch and a quarter so I I have a recipe so my working hoop is a specific circumference let's just say it's 56 inches now I know that I need 25 staves because the mathematical formula of my angle so now I need 25 staves that add up into that circumference so I have different recipes I have four different Stave sizes a b c and d and uh if I have three A's and ten B's and a couple C's I know that I can get that and then I can vary my recipe if I have a lot of smaller staves or larger staves we always have one large Stave and that's our bung Stave that's where the bunghole will be this one doesn't have a bung it's also if you look at a barrel it's also where the rivets are that bung Stave has been compromised by me putting a hole in it so we place our rivets there [Music] but so we have different ways to do that there was one Cooper who was only using the same size wood but he got a a huge amount of waste and it can be very inefficient yeah yes ma'am you've been using the term bilge I know there's the bilge or a boat as the whole uh-huh I would have called that a bulge right it probably was originally the Bulge but yeah we do call it the bilge this is the bilge this is the Bulge [Laughter] anybody else yes ma'am yes oh yes no so my 30 gallon barrel will mature whiskey after two years after that it can be reused but the sugar content is much lower as I said before here in America we're fairly mandated to use new Oak and Scotland they're federally mandated to use used barrels if I sent a Scottish man one of my new barrels he wouldn't be able to call it Scotch whiskey but [Music] our secondary Market most of the barrels go to Scotland and Island those Guinness barrels there that we saw stacked up they were stacked up there because that's basically a lumber yard they're going to take one of those barrels they're going to knock it down they're going to cut the tops of the staves off and remake the barrel and remake the staves yeah yes sir how long does the jarring process take anywhere between 30 and 45 seconds once I get the Flames coming out and it's very loud and deafening I start a counting process and then I stop so 30 seconds gives me a Char one 45 seconds gives me a Char three with a little bit of crackle and then some people really want to chard and then we really go for it yeah we have cannons aimed at the workshop they're up in the Schwann Gunk Ridge I yell fire and then they come down and then the fire goes out uh no I'm actually able to it's an interesting thing because when I'm charring and I've created the Cyclone of fire in the barrel I haven't really set the barrel on fire I've just introduced it to this flaming tornado so once I cut the air off the barrel is extinguished pretty quickly the wood never is really on fire it's just next to the fire yeah what's that yeah so I use I use cutoffs mostly from the fur this has been Kiln dried I don't have to bend it and that's much drier my Oak is very wet so it's sometimes hard for me to get a fire going but we start a small fire and then I have a long extension that goes onto my air hose otherwise I burn my fingers and it's very hot it's about 1300 degrees and uh and it's wonderful you guys ever come to the shop and see us do it you put your head right in there afterwards and you smell like you're in a bakery and you can feel the tannins needling up into your nose like you would think it would smell like something burned or or resinous but it has a beautiful sweet bread like smell that yeah oh yeah sure yeah yeah yeah huh oh yeah all the time yes sir hit Monitor and control the moisture content in your stock wood oh yeah well um I don't put heat on in my shop it's a very cold shop because I don't want it to dry out and we have moisture readers we have these little things that can read the moisture when I'm getting wood from the place in Pennsylvania it's been three year air dried they do give me an average listening of the moisture content that I can check yeah but I have had to wait some would we bring it into the house usually for about two or three weeks and let it get dried but usually I like to be at like 19 percent yeah yeah yes sir you put the bottom in the same way you put the topping yeah they're both the same in fact uh Ben Franklin called New Jersey a barrel that had been bunged at both ends yeah so they're completely symmetrical oh yeah the head on this they call them heads uh there's no top or bottom necessarily uh just a barrel head yeah yeah yes sir shop um in the Mohawk arts building where the water tower is uh right up here you've driven by it a million times a Sydney Reese's old place and Brenda and Sydney's old place uh so we're right up the hill I can roll a barrel right down here yeah yes yeah oh yeah and there's your Machinery yeah when you look at pictures like in the 1300s yeah yeah yeah make those things those things water tank and last because they don't have anywhere near your capability yet oh they were once at a time time and these barrels are supposed to hold liquid for that long without leaking yeah I mean I talked about the formula which is rudimentary and a lot of coopering is rather rudimentary and like with any trade if you start at 16 and do it every day for 30 years you get very good at it and be able to pass it down they would cut these staves with the large Acts they would do ax work they didn't have any automated machines like I do they were just very skilled at what they do the same way they build Bridges and arches and churches yeah yeah yeah it was just something that you did every day and you just made staves and you get pretty good at it there's different markers and gauges they could use an eyeball the angle and stuff there's also a large What's called the Cooper's plane I brought some planes over anyways look this is called the sun plane this plane was used to level off the top of the barrel coopering is very interesting because it has really its own set of tools if I built you a table or a chair or or a home or a barn I'd really be using the same sort of woodworking tools but coopering has its own set one of the ways I learned how to do this was I bought a collection of tools it was being auctioned off it was from a museum in Ottawa that was de-assessing their collection and I had a large collection of 18th and 19th century hand tools this is a cruising plane here you can see this v-groove right here maybe and that they would take this and cut into the oak to get the groove and the chime and the crows that we talked about there I'll go back to that yeah that was done with planes like this so I bought a large collection that had every sort of tool that was used through the coopering process so between this reverse engineering the barrel and then setting up the mid-century furniture making machinery and shaper as we had in the shop I was able to get my shaper to do what this did yeah yeah yes with all the barrels that can only be used once yeah and the whatever hundreds of millions of Barrels have been made just in the last century yeah uh well they go to Scotland mostly that doesn't have any more virgin Oak forests they get chopped in half and sold at atoms for Planters you do see a large now there's uh you know there's Barrel tequila and Barrel coffee so there are a lot out there but they mostly go overseas and used as just millable Lumber to make new barrels great no not if it's kept well you're going to lose the sugar content but um there's a nun in Vermont who makes cheese out of a barrel she's had for like 50 years sister Noel she somehow was the only person who could convince the Board of Health that uh that she can make cheese in it but our ancestors use this for everything yes yes Sherry and Porter Second Use yeah they use those yeah and there's a Sherry cask and there's something called an imitation Sherry Cask yeah but they're and again they're getting the wood from us from our barrels yeah and they just reconstitute it yeah yeah Charming the barrel before the Advent of an air compressor was a Bellows used or something fellows yeah and just if I start a fire in here and sit long enough it'll it'll get rather hot some people put the barrel down like this and start a small fire and roll the barrel around uh yeah um they my clients tell me that my barrels taste better because I don't use propane if you've ever seen a video with the flame shooting out of the barrel at Jack Daniels they're infusing it with propane now we grill on propane but I always say that if you roast a marshmallow on a propane torch and roast it over the fire you're going to taste the difference so I've been told by my clients that I have a standalone flavor because of the lack of propane that I use and the residue that's left on the inside of the barrel would something like this close to eat chickens oh this tonight right now for you in the front row we'll give you the difference my fermenting tanks are anywhere between two and three hundred I keep them small they're easier to ship this fits in a nice box uh yeah and you can find them on my website or my Instagram store my barrels I recently have raised the price uh my 30 gallon barrel is 375 dollars 200 of that is material so um yeah that's why you have to make a lot of barrels to make money I'm going to figure that out one day though yeah I went from the lucrative trade of custom irrigation into the lucrative trade of coopering did I mention that I'm only one of 28 Coopers yeah so it's hard to make money but that's why I like making the large tanks and just keeping it different separate as opposed to having to make 40 barrels a week just to make our numbers and I chose not to go down that path yes interesting names of the various sizes yes can you explain for us whether circuses use them because in the vet for the Benefit of Mr Kite very good fire oh yes and in fact when we meet Huckleberry Finn in the first chapter of the book He's living in a Hogs head Barrel I can't tell you why it's in the circus but I do have a story about the hog's head um from the barrel we get many things and one of them is the brand name or trademark they would brand the head of the barrel with a rudimentary logo so they knew where the barrels were coming from and Legend has it that a bull's head would be on there and in an English accent when they saw that Ox head they said Hogs head and that that's where the term Hogs had came from I cannot verify that but that's where so I keep it out of the lecture oh yeah there's great names a punching a ton a Firkin yeah and I called my Barrel Firkin and my 30 gallon of Trenta when I got into it there was a backlash against small barrels so I purposely didn't call it a 10 gallon or five gallon the good old boys in Kentucky did not like what was happening here and what was happening is that places like tuttletown was maturing in small barrels so they can get it to the market faster that annoyed the Kentucky people and a book came out called why small barrels or ruining the whiskey industry so I picked Firkin instead of five gallon barrel huh um yes well no uh but I am on uh staff at Tuttle town that they were bought by Scottish overlords and those overlords told them that they needed a Cooper that they could call and they had a problem I do a lot of repair work because of my background in woodworking I'm able to repair barrels and I've worked with some people who taught me some of the tricks on how to do that so I will go and repair leaky barrels yeah so I do work with title town but they're owned by a large Scottish Corporation huh but they still have to use new material right they use barrels from automated factories yes um but um they but um it's one thing to buy the barrel what Coopers did not only were to make the barrels but they also repair and upkeep those barrels from getting liquid out of it to stopping the leaks yeah and that's what I do also for Tunnel Town yeah I get free whiskey no it's dangerous work and I can have people on there I have an assistant who makes the Rings and helps me Mill people have approached me for that um but it is a tricky thing that I I've had some younger people work with me but um no I don't offer an apprentice program yeah the Shapers are very dangerous so I I have to be careful I do I have them all I play the piano so it helps yeah and um but in the olden days there would have been a union or in England what are they called liveries that I could have gone to that had trained men ready to go I met an old Irish Cooper him and his six brothers are trained to be Coopers and he told me what they would do they would send them down into dark Barrel Cellars no lights and he could he would tap on the barrels and he could tell which ones were leaking oh that one they would pull that one out and they would fix it um but no just like many trades like furniture making or upholstery or coopering there's no longer anywhere to really learn it that's why it was so hard for me I had people coming back we were looking for things online you couldn't find it I can build an airplane I can learn Russian but you couldn't find anything out about the barrel now one thing is it probably died during Industrial Revolution and nobody's like hey Paul you should write a book on coopering so nothing was ever really written down it was handed down through generation to generation so there was no information there's a little bit more online now and I do post some things but is a very secret sort of alchemy to it yeah it was very hard that's why I had to use these tools to teach me how to do it because there was nowhere to really there wasn't even any of the books just as like Barrel lore like I was talking about or different stories throughout the years and anecdotes but no real a way to do it yeah and now that's really dead now yeah the trade is fairly it's become completely automated like most woodworking trades are you know uh thanks everybody for coming and thank you the teenage male Museum thank you foreign

Channel: D&H Canal Historical Society

Views: 3,642

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Id: fAhXKXdfV3Q

Length: 71min 23sec (4283 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 27 2023