Coopering is the ancient craft of constructing wooden barrels. It is a skill that is key to whisky making and the traditions of hand coopering have been passed down through generations. However in today’s whisky industry hand coopering is a vanishing art and the number of skilled coopers is dwindling rapidly.
Shug , Master Cooper for The Glasgow distillery is one of less than 300 coopers remaining in Scotland. Here he runs through the journey from apprentice to master and the meandering journey to get there.
The Historic Art Of Building and Repairing Casks
Coopering is an ancient trade that dates back centuries, and these days there are very few actual coopers left – I believe less than 300 in Scotland. To keep the tradition alive is a real pleasure. With almost 30 years of experience I try to share my insights and skills with all the staff around me at the distillery to pass on the knowledge I have learned.
The skills involved in hand coopering are very traditional. I’ve worked at The Glasgow Distillery since 2015 and there is no automation; everything is done by hand, with hammer and driver. I love being able to spend my time being active, physical, and engaged—I am not one for sitting still for too long.
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Becoming A Cooper
My older brother was the Head Cooper and my uncle was the Production Director at Universal Containers in Maryhill, Glasgow. I left school aged 16 and immediately started as an apprentice there, a process which takes 5 years. As an apprentice you get teamed up with a Journeyman Cooper who shows you the ropes and the tricks of the trade.
My Journeyman was a man called Jimmy Hogg, a man who taught me everything I know. The way it would work back in that day was I would be paid a basic wage of £27, but the Journeyman Coopers were all on piecework – you got paid by the cask. My journeyman would also get paid for all the casks that I would make in a week so from day one the pressure was on to perform and make as many casks as you could. If I performed well that week my Journeyman would give me a cash bung on the Friday.
After the five years apprenticeship, and a week before my 21st birthday, I passed my Trade Test and became a fully qualified Cooper. The best part of passing the test was that you were now on piecemeal, getting 100% of your cask earnings each week, which was £2.40 for a standard barrel, and a bit more for larger casks such as a sherry butt or a port pipe.
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At 23 I applied for a job with Grants in Irvine, so I handed in my notice to my uncle, who was not too impressed. Concerned that I was moving away to make a little extra cash, he asked me to wait a day and when I next came into the cooperage he told me I had an interview with J&B Distillers (later Diageo as of 1986) on Blythswood Estate in Renfrew. It turned out that it wasn’t an interview at all but ended up being a job that he had secured for me.
Building 40 casks per week would get you a basic pay but anything over would be on bonus. By this time I was well and truly in my stride and repairing over 100 casks per week and making good money.
I spent 20 happy years there but in 1999 I was given the opportunity to go into mechanical coopering—working more with machines than with your hands like the traditional method I was trained in. I turned the offer down and decided to take voluntary redundancy instead.
At this point I had accepted that my coopering days were behind me. I worked as a Hackney black cab driver for the next 14 years.
A Return To The Industry
One day, out of the blue, my old managing director at Diageo asked if I wanted to do a job for them at Penderyn in Wales. The money was good so I went down to help them a couple of times, sharing my knowledge and helping them repair any faulty casks.
The same friend then asked me if I wanted to do the same at Speyside Distillery, which I did.
Then, in 2015, he asked me if I was interested in helping out a brand new distillery which had just started producing single malt in Hillington, an Industrial Estate on the outskirts of Glasgow. It was here that I met Liam Hughes, and the rest is history. I joined the distillery just days after the first cask was filled, starting with one day per week.
One day per week became two, then three, and eventually became full time. I have been with the Glasgow distillery for nine years now and have witnessed it grow from a start-up into a fully formed, successful producer exporting around the world. The growth has been remarkable but the team here still keep to the same hands-on ethos within production that I witnessed from the very beginning.
The Tools Of A Cooper
At The Glasgow Distillery it is all old and traditional techniques. I use a variety of tools in my day-to-day job:
- A coopers hammer.
- A Driver; a tool used for pushing hoops down and tightening them.
- A Crumb Knife which makes sure the staves are the same weight (the same thickness) to prepare the croze – the shape every stave has to make sure the end fits in uniformly across the cask.
- A Croze Block which cuts the croze
- A Plucker, which is a coopers spoke shave to make the outside smooth – a ‘coopers plane’
- A Adze – which is a multi use tool for many different jobs
- A large compass to measure ends
- A Heading knife for cutting in ends
- A stiddy, which is coopers anvil for hand riveting (there’s no rivet machine so I do this by hand and tighten the hoops by hand as I learned in my apprenticeship).
- And a leather apron!
I was given these tools as an apprentice cooper, and these are still the same ones that I use to this day. A coopers’ tools will last a lifetime if you look after them well. My old journeyman also gave me some tools which were presented to him when he started, so they must be over 60 years old.
Being a cooper in the whisky industry is especially rewarding as it’s a brilliantly social and enjoyable industry to work within. It is full of characters and I have made great friends over the years. People all around the world love whisky, it’s a real passion for so many people, and whether I am helping our team out at an event in Glasgow or showing some visitors around the distillery I am always blown away by the appreciation and special place that scotch whisky has in the hearts of so many people.
It’s a privilege to contribute to that in my own, small, way.
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