Beer from the wood
Traditional coopers are slowly becoming a thing of the past. Roger Protz looks at the role of the cask in beer making today.
onathan Manby is the final chip off the old block. He is a journeyman cooper at Theakston’s brewery in Yorkshire, the last man to serve his apprenticeship and fashion wooden beer casks. The ancient skill of turning staves of timber into beer casks held together by hoops is likely to disappear some time during this century.
Coopering was once a major industry in Britain. The term cooper is a corruption of an old Dutch word kupe, meaning an enclosure, as in a chicken coop. For centuries both wet and dry goods were stored in wooden casks and by Tudor times coopers formed powerful guilds in towns and cities. Their trade developed rapidly with the rise of commercial brewing and by the 19th century, when England was the greatest brewing nation on earth, many thousands of coopers were employed to build, maintain and repair casks.
Before the development of glass bottles and then, in the 20th century, metal casks, cans and kegs, wooden casks were the only containers that could hold and store beer. In the 1880s it was estimated that 100,000 people were employed in bottling and coopering, of whom the greater number would have been coopers.
Today there are a few hundred coopers left in Britain and most of them are employed in the Scotch whisky industry. Only Marston’s in Burton-on-Trent, Sam Smith’s in Tadcaster, Theakston’s in Masham and Wadworth of Devizes still employ coopers. The last three breweries still serve “beer from the wood” in their pubs while the coopers at Marston’s rep.....
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By Roger Protz
Section : Beer history
Page number : 52
