The cooper’s trade and the cider cask

A cask is held together by geometry and compression rather than by fastenings. Staves are shaped so that their edges meet along their whole length when the cask is drawn into a barrel form, and the hoops force them together hard enough that no glue, nail or gasket is needed. Getting that right by eye and by hand, so that the joint is liquid-tight, is the whole of the skill.

The working sequence was consistent. Staves were dressed and jointed to a curve, raised inside a hoop into a rough cone, drawn in over heat and moisture until the free ends could be hooped, then trimmed at the ends, chamfered, and grooved to take the head. The groove that receives the head is the croze, cut with a tool of the same name; the bevel inside the end is levelled with a howel and a chiv. The bung hole is bored last.

The trade divided by what a cask was for. Wet or tight coopering made vessels for liquid; dry or slack coopering made containers for solids, to a lower standard; white coopering made straight-sided vessels such as buckets, churns and tubs. A wet cooper served a long apprenticeship, and the distinction between the branches was defended, because the standard of work required in each was genuinely different.

Very few casks were made new for cider, because the drink could not carry the cost. Cider was low in value per gallon, made on farms with little cash, and needed vessels in quantity. What it used instead was the second-hand cask trade: vessels that had already held brandy, rum, sherry, port, wine or beer, sold on by merchants and dealers once the original contents were out of them.

That has a direct consequence for what farmhouse cider was like, and it is not a romantic one. A cask that has held spirit behaves differently from one that has held beer; an old cask carries its own resident microflora in the wood; a cask that has been badly kept can sour a batch outright. Much of the character attributed to traditional cider — including the oxidative and phenolic notes now sought deliberately — came from vessels chosen for availability and price rather than for effect.

Ports mattered for this reason. Bristol, and to a lesser extent the smaller west-coast ports, handled imported wine and spirit in cask and were therefore a source of empties for the cider counties behind them. The material history of West Country cider runs through the wine trade in a way that has little to do with anybody’s intentions about flavour.

A wooden cask is not a container so much as an ongoing obligation. It has to be kept full or kept sweet; it dries out and leaks if left empty; it takes up spoilage organisms and passes them to the next fill. The farm cellar therefore carried a routine of scalding with hot water, scrubbing with chains or stones, and treatment with burning sulphur — stumming — before a cask was filled again.

Hoops slipped and had to be driven back; staves failed and were replaced; heads were taken out for cleaning and refitted. On a large farm this was work for a visiting cooper once or twice a year, and on an estate or at a commercial works it was a resident trade. The vocabulary of the cellar — shive, keystone, bung, spile, chime — is cooperage vocabulary, shared with brewing.

None of this was optional, and the standard of it largely determined whether a year’s cider survived. Accounts of farm cider that treat spoilage as bad luck are missing the point: soundness was a function of cellar discipline, and the discipline was mostly cask discipline.

The trade contracted in stages and then went very quickly. Metal casks appeared in brewing between the wars and spread after 1945; stainless steel arrived in dairying and then in drinks; the pressurised keg displaced the wooden cask in the licensed trade through the 1960s. Each of those removed a large block of demand for a cooper’s work at once.

Brewery cooperages, which had employed coopers in numbers and trained most of them, closed through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Apprenticeships ended with them. What remained was a small number of coopers working in the spirits industry, where wooden casks are not a container choice but a requirement of the product.

For cider the shift to glass-lined steel, stainless steel and plastic tanks removed a source of spoilage and a source of character in the same move. The loss of character is easy to sentimentalise; the removal of a chronic and expensive source of ruined batches is what the people making the change were thinking about.

Cask capacities are a recurring trap in cider history. Firkin, kilderkin, barrel, hogshead, butt and pipe were standard names for standard capacities in some trades and periods and not in others, and cider hogsheads in particular were not consistently the same size as beer or wine hogsheads. A volume figure taken from an old account and converted using a modern table can be substantially wrong.

Surviving casks are also skewed evidence. What lasted is what was well made, kept dry and valued enough not to be broken up for firewood, which over-represents the good end of the trade. The ordinary farm cask, patched and rehooped until it failed, is largely gone.

Museum collections in the cider counties hold the tools alongside the vessels, and the tools are the better evidence, because a croze or a chiv only makes sense in the hands of somebody who knows the sequence it belongs to. They document a body of knowledge that the written record barely touches.