Cooper (profession)
A cooper is a craftsman who produces wooden casks, barrels, vats, buckets, tubs, troughs, and other similar containers from timber staves that were usually heated or steamed to make them pliable.
Examples of a cooper's work include casks, barrels, buckets, tubs, butter churns, vats, hogsheads, firkins, tierces, rundlets, puncheons, pipes, tuns, butts, troughs, pins and breakers.
[9] Another Egyptian tomb painting dating to 1900 BC shows a cooper and tubs made of staves in use at the grape harvest.
[11] A lake village near Glastonbury dating to the late Iron Age has yielded one complete tub and a number of wooden staves.
[citation needed] The Roman historian Pliny the Elder reports that cooperage in Europe originated with the Gauls in Alpine villages where they stored their beverages in wooden casks bound with hoops.
The Greek geographer Strabo records wooden pithoi (casks) were lined with pitch to stop leakage and preserve the wine.
Julius Caesar used catapults to hurl barrels of burning tar into towns under siege to start fires.
They were made of Pyrenean silver fir and the staves were one and a half inches thick and featured grooves where the heads fitted.
These items required considerable craftsmanship to hold liquids and might be bound with finely worked precious metals.
[17] After the Battle of Hastings in 1066, when the Normans started settling in England, much wine was shipped over the English Channel from France.
[21] Whaling ships usually carried a cooper on board, to assemble shooks (disassembled barrels) and maintain casks.
[23] Many coopers worked for breweries, making the large wooden vats in which beer was brewed, such as Guinness in Ireland.
Beer kegs had to be particularly strong in order to contain the pressure of the fermenting liquid, and the rough handling they received when transported, sometime over long distances, to pubs where they were rolled into tap-rooms or were lowered into cellars.
This is still done, but now because the slightly toasted interior of the staves imparts a certain flavour over time to the wine or spirit contents that is much admired by experts.
In the 1960s, breweries started using metal casks because of cost and simplicity; since then, the trade of master cooper in England has been dwindling.
[27] When he appealed for apprentices, there were many applications, but the government's insistence that trainees should attend a university killed off a lot of the interest.
Ramiro Herrera, Master Cooper for Caldwell Vineyard in the Napa Valley, was sent to France to learn his trade, where only two out of 40 starters completed the four-year training course.
