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Coopering is one of the trickiest of all ancient crafts, but a skilled practitioner can do the job in under four hours, says Jon Henley
The first thing to realise is that they are not called barrels. Or at least, only if they hold 36 gallons. Otherwise they are hogsheads (which hold 54 gallons), kilderkins (18), firkins (nine) and pins (four-and-a-half); the generic term is cask. The second is that coopering is among the most intricate of all traditional crafts. The third is that to make a cask, a master cooper like Alastair Simms uses neither written measure nor template. Just his eye.
To start, you take your staves of quartered English oak (most of it comes from France these days) and your cooper's axe with its offset blade ("so you don't knacker a knuckle," says Simms, a plain-speaking Yorkshireman), and you taper the sides of the stave at either end. Next, held firmly on the cooper's block with a hook, or clamped in the sit-upon shaving horse, the inside of each stave is shaped with a hollowing knife (which does what it says), and the outside corners rounded with a backing knife.
Thus prepared, the staves are jointed on a jointer, essentially a six-foot-long plane. Simms has two; the new one dates from 1850. You stick one end into your groin, and put a bevel, or angle, on each stave edge. Simms says the angle must be accurate to within one 2,000th of an inch. He judges this by eye. This is the joint; it has to be perfectly true or the cask will not be tight, for no glue or sealant is used in making a wooden cask.
When you have enough finished staves, you "raise" the cask: stand them on end inside an iron raising hoop, and drive an ash truss hoop over the top. Next, you steam your half-built cask by moistening it, which softens the timber, and standing it over a fire of wood shavings. Then you hammer consecutively smaller truss rings down over the staves to draw them tight (for bigger jobs, Simms now uses a fancy hydraulic windlass). Then you place it over the fire again, to set the staves so firmly you can remove all except the top and bottom truss rings, trim the stave ends with an adze, and bevel them with a topping plane.
Still with me? You make your steel hoops on the bick iron, your chiv and croze make the groove into which the oaken cask head will slot after being measured up with a compass, cut to size with a bandsaw and shaped with a heading knife. Then all that is left is to use your downright and your buzz to clean up the outside, your auger to make a bung hole, your driver to hammer the hoops home, and your stamp to put your mark on the finished product. And there you have it: a cask capable of bearing pressures of up to 40 pounds per square inch, without losing a drop. Three and half hours from start to finish, Simms reckons. But he's been doing it for 30 years.
The Carpathians invented coopering; the earliest known picture dates back to 2690 BC. Wooden casks for transporting and storing all sorts of liquids were still in widespread use in Britain until the early 1960s; only then did metal and, still later, plastic take over. Now it's basically only real ales and whisky that are still kept in casks. And even a traditional brewer like Wadworth in Devizes, which employs Simms, uses mostly metal kegs. Simms, 45, is one of four coopers left working in England.
Much of his work is repair and maintenance, or breaking up and cutting down large old casks to build smaller ones. He hopes to train an apprentice before he quits, and there's plenty of interest. But one he had before now earns twice as much driving a forklift truck. "It's hard, physical work," he says. "And you have to love wood, and these old tools - in my trade, anything after the second world war's rubbish. But they're like your kids, really, your casks. You see 'em coming in and out, each bearing your mark. You look after 'em. The satisfaction's tremendous."
• Watch the cask-maker at work in Sam Frost's slideshow at guardian.co.uk/money/series/disappearing-acts
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