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Coopering

Jointer, Waterloo, Ontario; circa 1941; 96.2.1. View Image Notes in New Window

Barrels were an important commodity for the Seagram distillery and the plant employed as many as sixteen coopers to keep them in good repair. By the 1920s, new barrels were no longer being manufactured on site but at a nearby specialty shop, Canada Barrels and Kegs Limited (Canbar). The distillery continued to employ coopers to repair broken barrels for reuse. Coopering was an apprenticed trade, and the position of cooper was one of the highest paying jobs in the plant.

The cooper had to work in a hot and dirty environment and the job required a great deal of strength. Each cooper had his own work bench and was responsible for his own tools. The importance of coopers keeping their tools sharp was stressed by former cooper John Schnarr: "With a sharp knife you could just peel the wood off and if it was dull, you chewed it off." The plant's cooper shop was closed in 1959 when it became more economical for the distillery to have repairs done at the Canbar shop.

Cooperage

One of the world's oldest crafts is the art of barrel making. Even with new methods of storing, preserving and packaging, well-crafted barrels remain essential to the production of quality wine and spirits.

Whisky ages in barrels made from the heart of white oak. In fact, it is these barrels that impart the smooth, mellow quality, flavour, colour and aroma we associate with a mature whisky. The inside of a barrel is charred once to open the pores of the wood, allowing the whisky to interact with the natural oak flavourings on initial filling and with oak and residual whisky on refilling.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, most whiskies sold in North America and Europe were not aged. The optimum ageing time for each whisky is unpredictable. Representative samples are taken form barrels every six months to monitor progress.

How to Repair a Barrel

Cooper's Shop (Recreation). View Image Notes in New Window

"They brought [the broken barrels] to the cooper shop and we would take the barrels apart ... knock them down. You took all the hoops off but the one, the top head hoop, and then you could sneak a stave out, match it up with another .... We had what we called 'knock down barrels', and you would go over to this barrel and measure it, now this is about the size I'll need, so you'd take a stave out of there and take it over and put it in to fit ... where the broken stave was .... But usually, the one end fit pretty close, you could match, but the other end usually it was too long ... not too short because then it wouldn't work. You tried to make it as close as you could.

But then when you got the one end together, then you turned it over and you brought the other end in. And this is when you had it all together that you had to start shaping it again .... Well you sawed your top off, shaped it with your camphor knife and then you took the howel and cut the groove in the side of the barrel and then you used the croze to cut the groove where the barrel head fits into and then you made the head, if the head was no good you'd have to make a new head, or get a new one."

John Schnarr, cooper, 1947 to 1956.