It has been suggested that the economic downturn of recent years has eased the supply problem. Fewer new homes are being built and there’s less demand for premium wood for high-end furniture, so all that wood can be used elsewhere. The Whiskey Wash recently reached out to Brown-Forman to get their thoughts on the barrel shortage from the perspective of a company that owns its own cooperages. According to VP, Director of Corporate Communications and PR Phil Lynch:
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“As for our challenges, last year’s extremely wet and long winter weather created a temporary supply chain issue with securing logs from which to make barrel staves, because the loggers couldn’t get into the forests to log until the ground dried out. But as the year progressed, that problem diminished.
“Of course, with all the new distilleries being built across the U.S., there is an increasing demand for barrels, which is why we opened a second cooperage in Alabama and recently bought property in Owen County, Indiana on which we are building a fourth stave mill to produce staves for our cooperages. We also have three other stave mills in Jackson, OH; Clifton, TN; and Stevenson AL.
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“I will also note that Independent Stave Company recently announced plans to expand capacity its operations here in Kentucky, so the barrel-making operations are expanding to meet the growing demand for barrels.”
While there have been hiccups in the supply chain over the last few years, the only distilleries likely to experience a serious issue with a barrel shortage are the smaller and newer ones who haven’t yet had the opportunity to build those relationships with cooperages. But even the smaller cooperages are expanding their capacity to meet demand, so this shortage is not likely to last very long.
