Peter Ross at large: Skilled coopers are keeping Scotch whisky traditions alive

By Peter Ross
Published on Sunday 20 November 2011 00:00

IT IS hard to say what strikes you first, the stink of drink or the clamour of hammers, upon entering Cambus Cooperage near Alloa.

This is an extraordinary place. In the yard outside, empty casks are piled in pyramids 20-feet high, the blistering paint on their lids stamped with the names of distilleries long closed. Over these man-made mountains loom the green-grey mass of the Ochil Hills, their tops shrouded by cloud.

A cooper called David McGarrigle is busy dismantling casks that are to be restored. Despite the cold, he is stripped down to a vest, revealing the power in his arms and shoulders. Coopering requires a blend of finesse and brute strength. Taking his five-pound hammer and a driver made from beech and steel, he breaks open the lids on both ends of a cask and removes some of the iron hoops. These casks are oak and not light; they weigh up to 188lbs (85kg) when empty, but McGarrigle birls his as if it were a dancing partner.

He is 46 years old, has been a cooper since he was 15, and will have worked on something like 350,000 casks in that time. The McGarrigle family tally would be larger still. His father and grandfather were coopers, and no end of uncles and cousins and in-laws. It was inevitable that he would follow them into the trade. There was no escape. But he loves it.

“Coopering has always been hard, hard, heavy work,” he says. “But I’m passionate because it’s an auld craft, there’s not many of us left, and it’s good to keep the auld skills going. We don’t want to die off like the miners. It would be sad to see it go.”

All around the cooperage are huge bonded warehouses, built in dark brick; in these lie three million casks, stacked high in the darkness, time and the wood working their magic upon the spirit which, one day, will be officially classified Scotch whisky – or, to be specific, Johnnie Walker, J&B and Bell’s. These casks once contained bourbon or sherry, and the spirit, as it matures, takes on some of those flavours. It is a long, slow, silent, ancient process. In the meantime, as around 2 per cent of volume evaporates from within the casks each year, the angels take their share.

Casks, by the way, is the correct word. Not barrels. A barrel is a particular size of cask, holding 36 gallons. You also get pins, puncheons and butts. The most common size of cask used in distilling is the hogshead, holding 56 gallons of whisky, worth roughly £10,000, which is why they need to be made correctly. Casks are made from oak from America and mainland Europe, much of it from the French forest of Tronçais. American oak is known among coopers as “bastard oak” on account of its hardness.

Spirit is brought here from distilleries all over Scotland and placed into casks to age. The casks are the work of the coopers. There are 40 working here, which, when it comes to coopers, is a lot. If trades count as endangered species, coopers are on the brink of extinction. There are, perhaps, 200 left in the whole of Britain, the vast majority in Scotland. It was a job once so common it became a surname, and not just here; the German Fassbinder means cask binder. But now the men of Cambus find themselves asked, on occasion, “What’s a cooper?” – which is a sadness for them.

They could, if they wished, explain that the trade goes back thousands of years. The first evidence of its existence comes from a painting on the wall of an Egyptian tomb dating back to 2,690BC. The word cooper is thought to derive from the Latin word “cupa”, meaning vat, so you can be sure the Romans knew all about it. At one time, there would have been tens of thousands of coopers working in Britain, making casks for the preservation and transportation of all sorts of commodities. At the end of the 1980s, there were still approximately 2,500.

Increasing mechanisation and the use of metal casks for storing beer are the reasons for the decline in coopers. Yet it does not appear to be a terminal decline. There will always be a need for the judgment of a human eye and the skill of a human hand, which is why the Cambus Cooperage – which cost Diageo £10 million to build and which will have its official opening later this month – is full of men full of pride. There is plenty of robot technology here, yes, but the workshop walls are lined with tools of designs which predate the industrial revolution.

Here you will find the croze board and the adze; borer, bick iron and belly knife; scullup, shiv and swarth. Coopers on the east and west coasts of Scotland have different names for their tools. These are attractive, obscure-looking pieces of kit, their precise use unclear from their appearance. “You won’t,” I’m told, “buy one of them in B&Q.”

This is quite true. There is a tradition among coopers of making their own tools. It is a rite-of-passage of sorts that has become a practical necessity. These days, when there are so few coopers, there is little point in manufacturers mass-producing their tools. A number of the Cambus coopers have their names carved or stamped on the tools they made. This also has the advantage of making the tool uniquely theirs. Some of these tools will last a cooper his whole working life and so he guards them jealously; a hammer to a master cooper is akin to Picasso’s favourite paintbrush. As the shaft is made of wood, the cooper will, over time, wear the shape of his grip into the grain.

“The important thing about a cooper’s tools is that they are an extension of yourself,” explains Brian Tease, 49. “If I tried to use somebody else’s, it just wouldn’t feel the same.”

The Picasso comparison, by the way, is not entirely hyperbolic. Though the coopers are practical men making practical objects, they see a beauty in casks that most of us might miss. The voluptuous bulge, the elegant curve, the lack of leaks. Attention to detail is stressed above all things. No whisky would be lost if every stave at the top was not planed level, and yet it is. “It’s just pride in workmanship,” says Tease.

John Carberry, 38, has made some of his own tools, and stamped them with his name, but has inherited others from his late grandfather, who had himself inherited them from an old cooper. Sitting on the workbench known as a mare, shaving a stave with his grandfather’s belly knife, he muses on this legacy. “It’s an honour and privilege to do the same job he did. When I was a boy, I used to go with my mother to visit him, and he always used to leave out a wee tack-hammer, some nails, and some wood for me. That was how my interest started. Then, when he died, I got some of his tools. I didn’t understand what their true potential was at first, but I loved using them.”

He certainly understands their potential now, and is one of the tutors tasked with instructing the apprentices in the art of coopering. He is also pleased to note that his 11-year-old son has expressed an interest in the trade. Coopering seems to be one of those jobs, rare these days, that passes from father to son. The Clackmannanshire area has no shortage of coopering dynasties, whole families banging out a rhythm of hammer on wood down through the decades and beyond.

“I want to follow in my dad’s footsteps,” says Scott Dawson, 32, a second-year apprentice, whose father, Billy Dawson, is the longest-serving cooper with Diageo, having been in the trade for 43 years. “I think my dad’ll be really, really proud if I manage to pull it off, eh?”

Apprentice coopers, once upon a time, served seven years before they could become journeymen. Now, the apprenticeship lasts four years. It used to be that an apprentice, on the day when he finished serving his time, would be initiated into full cooperhood by way of a particular initiation rite. Health and safety concerns have, sadly, done away with this ceremony now, and Charlie Drysdale, the 57-year-old shop steward, was among the last to experience it – in 1975. “Thirty or 40 coopers put me in a cask with oil, dirt off the floor, urine, anything they could find. There was a lot of dust and it was difficult to breathe. It feels like an eternity when you’re getting rolled about in it. I’ve seen guys get nasty gashes or burst their noses open on the way into the cask.”

Those days are gone, and yet in a cooperage there is a strong sense that days are never really gone. This is a place in which the present takes on the flavours of the past, much as whisky takes on sherry or bourbon. These casks can last a century or more. They are made from trees which were centenarians themselves. They are worked on by men using inherited tools and skills that stretch back generations. All that swirling, distilled history and experience is locked in tight to every cask and not a drop is spilled.

“You take a bit of satisfaction when you tell people you are a cooper, aye,” says David McGarrigle. “When people enjoy a wee dram it’s aw doon tae me.”

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George Coutts

Sunday, November 27, 2011 at 06:06 AM

And Coopering will be the New Trade so 2014 will herald New Aprenteships But Dont tell London for Crists Sake!! Mum´s the word!

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George Coutts

Sunday, November 27, 2011 at 05:54 AM

And just wait until Independence is declaired. Down goes the Duty Tax andup goes WHISKY PRODUCTION. Required Equipment for the FREEDOM PARTY......is, 1 Kilt, 1 Tent and 1 Litre 12 year old WHISKY. Estimated crowd 15 Million so don´t even think of a Hotel or Bed and breakfast. Just pitch your Tent on Arthur´s Seat and LET THE CELEBRATION BEGIN. Crackin time Guaranteed!!!! Estimated date 16th June 2014.

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