A full whiskey barrel weighs about 500 pounds. CrossFit all you want, you’re not going to carry those back and forth all day and live to tell the tale.
Fortunately, barrels are designed in a way that makes it easy to move them from place to place, even when they’re full. If you’re looking to move some whiskey from point A to point B, you’ve got a few different options:
The Rim Roll
Imagine: You’re alone in the rack house. You’ve selected a perfect barrel for your next single barrel bottling. It’s been brought down from the rack, and now it’s sitting on its end, waiting to be transferred to the bottling line. It’s not on a pallet, so you can’t forklift it. Tipping it over to roll it on its side seems risky. What do you do now?
You rim roll. Tilt the barrel to the side, so it’s resting only on one small part of its rim. Then, start rolling. It’s a little awkward at first, but once you get the hang of it, it’s fast and fun. Just don’t roll too fast, or you’ll have a runaway barrel!
The Barrel Roll
If a barrel is resting on its side, you can roll it just like a wheel. Many distilleries have an automated barrel transfer line that moves barrels this way. You can also roll a barrel directly across the ground. It’s a little harder to control than the rim roll, and if you’re not careful you risk damaging the bung, but for simplicity, the barrel roll can’t be beat. Just make sure to finish bung up, or you could get leaks.
Forklifting
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The world runs on pallets, and whiskey is no exception. Some distilleries store barrels on pallets for easy forklifting, while others use racking that can be forklifted directly. It may lack the romance of a skillfully executed rim roll, but it has the benefit of making it easy to stack barrels vertically.
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