Hoop, stock and barrel

Crafting wooden casks is an ancient art form that requires traditional makers to jump through hoops to construct vessels strong enough for the task of maturing precious Scotch whisky

-  Joe Gibbs

CIVILISATION, in the opinion of the author William Faulkner, began with distillation. A whisky connoisseur might add that it flowered with maturation. For, without ageing in the right environment, whisky remains a raw, brutal firewater, quite bereft of any refinement. That would have been of less concern to the famously boozed-up Faulkner, who held that there was no such thing as a bad whisky—it was only that some whiskies were better than others.

Nobody knows who discovered the alchemy of leaving the water of life—uisge beatha in the Gaelic—in a wooden barrel to acquire patina some centuries ago. It must have been a man of rare patience back in those thirsty days. Or, perhaps, it was the legendary Highland smuggler who forgot where he had hidden his hogshead, retrieving it years later to discover his beast had transformed into a beauty. Nonetheless, a fact on which experts do agree is that about 70% of the flavour and colour of whisky comes from the cask in which it is aged. The very existence of that barrel still largely depends on the ancient, highly skilled craftsmanship of an artisan known as a cooper, a word probably derived from the cupa or vat of Roman times.

As a foreman at Speyside Coopers in Craigellachie, one of Scotland’s four remaining commercial cooperages, succinctly put it: ‘Nae coopers. Nae whisky.’