How Whiskey Barrels Are Made: White Oak Staves, Charring and Cellar Aging

The Most Honest Furniture a Yankee Owns

Pull your chair up to the stove, fellow alchemist, and let us consider the barrel. It is the most honest piece of furniture a Yankee owns. Every blessed thing in New England has lived in one at some time or another: salt pork, salt cod, flour, nails, lamp oil, cider, the molasses that comes up from the Indies to be made into rum, and now and then a dead admiral.

You think I jest. When Lord Nelson took his musket ball at Trafalgar in 1805, the British could not bear to bury him at sea, so they folded his lordship into a cask of brandy and sailed him home to London. The sailors say some of the crew drilled a little hole and drank from that cask on the voyage, and an old salt still calls a sneaked drink 'tapping the admiral.' Picture the cup at your lips, with a faint aftertaste of epaulettes and a good deal of admiral. I have drunk worse at Grange suppers.

Down at the yard by the falls of the Suncook, Amos Brackett drives hoops with a steady tock-tock. Amos has hands like two burnt hams and a vocabulary that would peel the varnish off a hearse. He is a tight cooper, which some call a wet cooper, and his casks hold liquid: cider, spirits, molasses. The slack cooper, or dry cooper, makes barrels for flour, nails and apples, where a little gap between the staves does no harm. The white cooper makes pails, churns and washtubs and gets no respect from either of the others.

Riven White Oak and Hoop-Poles

The first secret of a tight cask is that Amos never saws a stave. He rives it out of the bolt with froe and maul, because a split follows the grain the way water follows a ditch. Saw across the grain and you open a thousand little channels, and the cask weeps like a widow who has learned at the reading of the will that the money went to the hired man. A riven stave stays tight.

The second secret is white oak, and nothing else. The pores of white oak are stopped up from within by little bladders the wood grows itself. Red oak is as open as a sieve; Amos once put his lips to one end of a length of it and blew his pipe smoke clean out the other end three feet away. Red oak holds whiskey the way a deputy holds a secret, so it goes to the slack cooper for apple barrels and nobody cries about it.

Then the hoops. Before iron took the trade, and in plenty of shops still, a cask was bound with hoop-poles: hickory or ash saplings split down the middle and bent green. Many a farmer in Barnstead and Gilmanton paid his winter taxes cutting hoop-poles in the swamp. The old Bay Colony thought barrels so important that the towns appointed cullers of staves to throw out bad lumber, and gaugers to measure what a cask held so nobody was cheated on a hogshead of rum. A free people resented that, but they resented a leaky rum cask more. Today the gauger works for Washington and comes up the turnpike with his long rod and his little brass-bound book to figure what I owe the Union.

Fire in the Belly of the Cask

When Amos raises a cask, he stands the staves in a ring with a hoop at one end, so the barrel splays out like a petticoat, and he sets a cresset inside. That is an iron fire basket full of oak chips. The heat softens the staves, he wets them down, and he draws them together with rope and windlass until they bend into the belly of the barrel. Leave the fire in longer and the inside goes black and crackled like gator hide. That is the char.

Who first charred a barrel on purpose? The Kentuckians credit a parson named Craig. Others blame a careless cooper, or a fellow who burned out cheap fish casks to get rid of the mackerel stink. I cannot prove a word of any of it, and neither can they.

What the fire does is plainer. Your copper has already done the first scrubbing, because the bright metal seizes the sulfur that would make spirit stink like a rotten egg in a hot stable. The char does the second: it is charcoal, and it grabs harsh compounds and some of the sulfur the copper missed. Beneath it lies the toasted layer, where oak was heated but not burnt. There the fire has broken the lignin into a vanilla smell fit for a Boston pastry shop and the wood sugars into something like caramel. That is where your color and sweetness come from. Every drop of spirit comes off the still as clear as spring water. Any man whose whiskey ran amber out of the worm is either a liar or has rust in his copper.

To char a small keg, work outside, well away from the still-house and any spirit or vapour, and keep two buckets of water close by, because two is how many you will want when the first one tips over. Knock out one head, stand the keg open end up, and set a handful of oak shavings burning inside. Let it roar. Within a minute the staves will crackle and blister. When it is black and checked like an alligator's back, clap the head on loosely to smother the fire or dash in a dipper of water, and stand back from the steam. Knock out the loose soot, set the head back, drive the hoops snug, and fill her with clean water for a day or two so the wood swells, since a new keg weeps until the oak has drunk its fill. Then empty the water and fill her with hearts.

Gaugers, Puncheons and a Bear

Since the statute has run, I will confess one. In the spring of '64, Amos built me a double-headed cask. A false head sat four inches below the real top, sealed with flour paste and beeswax. The chamber above it held mackerel brine and a few genuine fish heads, eyes and all, and beneath it lay forty gallons of my finest. I branded the head SALT MACKEREL, BOSTON. The gauger pulled the bung and ran his rod down, and it came up dripping brine with a mackerel eye stuck to the end, looking at him as if it pitied him. He wrote 'fish, no spirit' in his book and was sick in the ditch by the turnpike.

Then there was the puncheon, an empty cask of eighty-odd gallons that had soaked up whiskey for six years behind my still-house. One August night, Deputy Hollis Pike came sneaking around, heard my bear Barnaby's chain, knocked the head out of that puncheon and climbed in like a hermit crab. Barnaby smelled six years of good spirit in the white oak. He pulled the puncheon over and drew Hollis out by the boot the way I pull a stubborn molar. Hollis left behind one boot, one warrant and a square of trouser seat with a square of himself still attached. Barnaby licked the staves for an hour. I stitched the deputy face down in my dental chair for fifty cents, and he has hollered from the road ever since. There is no plainer proof of how much spirit white oak drinks.

Tales from the Blue Ridge

Miss Clara Higgins, an herbalist from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, says the mountain folk aged their spirits "impatiently, Doctor, the same as everybody." Her Uncle Jubal had heard that whiskey came out older for rocking on a flatboat, so he lashed a keg of persimmon brandy to the paddles of a mill wheel in Rockbridge County for a week. It wept brandy into the millrace, and the miller's johnnycake smelled so much of the tavern that folk called it 'tanglefoot bread' and swore it gave them barrel fever. At the end of the week there was a quart left, and it tasted of creek water and regret.

In the Shenandoah, a cooper named Hezekiah Rowe filed notches into his hoops, one for flour and two for brandy, so that runners working without a lantern could read their cargo by thumb. When the revenue caught on, he switched to counting nails in the heads, even for flour and odd for brandy. Clara's grandmother lost both eyebrows charring a keg over hickory chips and drew them back on with lamp-black, a little too high. Her cousin Tobe sweated a barrel with hot water to draw out the soaked spirit without asking what it had last held. It had been Aunt Effie's pickled pig's-feet barrel. He sold the yellow, briny result to a passing tax collector as Tidewater rye, and as Clara put it, "there's no force in creation so strong as a government man determined not to look a fool."

The Root Cellar Will Not Be Hurried

First the plain word: the law of the land requires a federal permit to distill spirits for drinking. A barrel cannot save a bad run, either. Bring the wash up gently over a low fire. Pour every drop of the foreshots on the ground, because they carry wood spirit, which blinds a man and then kills him. The sharp heads go out too. Only the sweet, clean hearts go into oak, and the oily tails are kept for the next charge. I bring my hearts down with spring water to a touch over a hundred by my Sikes hydrometer, the instrument the British excise adopted in 1818.

Then the keg goes down to the root cellar beside the potatoes and turnips. Cool and steady means slow. In summer the spirit swells into the wood, and in winter it draws back out carrying the oak's sweetness. Each season is one breath, and most years give only a few good breaths. In a damp cellar the spirit escapes through the wood faster than the water does, so the proof falls; in a hot, dry garret it climbs. Either way the barrel grows lighter. Folks call that the angels' share, and the angels of Merrimack County take more off me than the Bureau of Internal Revenue does.

Impatience is the most dangerous thing in distilling. The Tilton boys set their keg against the kitchen stove. The staves shrank, the hoops slid down like an old man's stockings, and the spirit ran across the floor toward the firebox. Keep heat away from spirit. Small kegs do work faster, because more of the spirit touches wood, but leave one a month too long and it tastes like a split-rail fence in August. Taste it every week or two from a clean glass thief, and pull it when it is right rather than when the calendar says so. As for the Boston rectifiers, they make six-year-old whiskey in an afternoon from burnt sugar, prune juice and a plug of chewing tobacco.

Ashes, Shavings and Other Hogwash

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether his uncle was right that hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads. Run water through hardwood ash and you get lye. That is potash, which this state once boiled down in asheries all along the Merrimack. Ash in a doubler makes a kettle of weak soap that foams, leaves a grey crust on the copper and does nothing about the heads. Red oak, the open-pored wood no tight cooper will allow in his shop, gives a woody, puckery tea of fence rail. Heads come off at the front of the run, and the only cure is a man with his nose over the jar and the nerve to pour them out.

Two more myths. A big, slow bead tells you something about the spirit's strength, but it does not tell you the spirit is clean, because spirit full of wood spirit beads just as prettily. Dark color does not prove age either. A small keg left too long by a warm stove goes as dark as coffee and tastes like a burnt barn, while a big old cask in a cold cellar may stay as pale as straw for years and taste like heaven's own pantry. Judge it by taste and smell, not by color. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.