A Cooper and a Microbiologist Walk Into a Bar
HEY THERE SPORTS FANS,
Despite the seeming reality that life, in its vicissitudes, is never quite great or terrible, but a rolling set of hills whose slopes we have a hand in setting, it can be tempting to describe it as a single mountain or valley, with a single, defining volta. Thus the (insanely spicy but nonetheless amusing) refrain that someone “peaked in high school,” or the equally amusing and now-famous fallacy that “2020 is going to be my year.”
But I believe, on my deathbed, that I will truthfully be able to point to a week in the summer of 2019 as the pinnacle of my existence, namely the week during which I made a bucket.
If I haven’t made it abundantly clear, I plan on opening an 18th century tavern somewhere on the east coast some day (Brooklyn? Philadelphia? Boston? Maybe I can start lobbying for insane tax incentives like Amazon), and a massive source of inspiration so far has been these videos by Townsends. Well, it just so happens that they went to one of a very, very few pseudo-operational period breweries at some point, and it just so happens that said brewery is a mere, like, six hour bus ride from NYC. So, during my annual trip to New York, I carved out a week or so for a trip to this Valhalla, Genesee County Village & Museum, in order to enjoy the Coopering Experience where, you guessed it, you learn how to make a bucket using 19th century tools and techniques. Spoiler alert: mine doesn’t hold water.
Towards the end of this experience, the Cooper and I were chatting about brewing with wood, and he suggested multiple times that I coat the bucket with Brewer’s Pitch if I want to do that, despite the fact that the practice is all but dead, if not entirely gone, these days. His surprise at the notion of using “raw” wood as a storage of fermenting or finished beer got me thinking about the history of cask lining, and this week we’re talking about it. Buckle up!
HOW WOOD IS GENERALLY USED IN BREWING
If you’ve brewed or distilled, you likely know that the barrels, like the ones for spirits, are unlined (indeed, that’s where most of the barrels for brewing and aging come from). The advantages to brewing and distilling are somewhat distinct, so I’ll leave Whiskey and Rum and the like to the side, and just discuss the role of wood in beer.
First of all, since, at least now, barrels are purchased used from distilleries (fun fact: legally, Bourbon must be aged in new barrels, creating a massive supply for the rest of the booze-making world), the immediate effect of using such a barrel is some flavor carryover into the beer you load into it. This is often a great thing, but can also be a nightmare - years ago, a beer we brewed, a Black IPA aged in Scotch barrels, was so awful and medicinal-smelling that we swore off of both the style and Scotch barrels forever. Some people loved it, and I don’t trust those people to cook me a grilled cheese. This, interestingly, is related to the classic homebrew advice to never use peated malt in beer (with extremely rare exceptions, at no more than 0.5% of the fermentables), due to the apparently rank combination of Peat flavors and, I guess, all beer.
In any case, beyond that effect, wood does two other things for beer: it allows in a fine stream of oxygen due to the permeability of wood (which is...maybe sometimes good?), and more importantly, it provides a very welcome home for various bacteria and wild yeasts. This can be a wonderful thing or an absolutely terrible thing, depending on your goals and a bit of luck.
For example, wooden aging vessels are commonly used in the fermentation and aging of tart (read: bacterially-flavored) Lambics and Gueuzes of Belgium, and of course in a large number of modern American spontaneous/wild-fermentation and sour breweries. The microbes that live in the wood are called upon batch after batch, and, like the brew days of yore (see the yeast section of this post), presumably a few batches are dumped here and there, and probably especially when first using a barrel, in order to establish a semi-stable colony.
An extreme example of this would be the infamous Log Beer, wherein, for one insane brewer, a log mimics the microbial haven provided by barrels, and even perhaps more honestly the magic sticks of brewing yore. This guy eventually had streaks made of the microbes from the log, which were then isolated and are now in use as the house yeast for his brewery. That’s pretty wild.
SO, WHY LINE?
If you’re going for a funky or sour beer, wood’s great, but the vast majority of beer produced today isn’t either of those things, and unless humanity has undergone a massive palate shift in the last few hundred years, I’d posit that for most people, cleaner beer has probably read as better beer. Point in case: one way they used to create unspoiled beer was to just brew it super fast, before the microbes could plant their flag, hence the origins of Mild Ale.
One clear reason, then, is simple: if you clog up the tiny pores and crevices in wood that harbor bacteria and wild yeast, by coating the whole inner surface of a cask with some relatively flavor-neutral, food-safe sealant, you avoid, or at least forestall if we’re talking pre-late-19th century, funkification (the technical term - jk).
As we’ll see shortly, I suspect that lining is a fairly recent practice (post-18th century), and one potential reason for this is globalization. Shipping beer over long distances and without refrigeration would heighten the risk of severe infection, necessitating the use of cask lining, and the slow ramping up of carbonation over the decades (that would take another blog post to thoroughly research, so we’ll leave that as a hypothesis for now) would necessitate a vessel that can take higher pressures, a capability which this article implies lined casks have.
Oh, and what is the lining? It’s essentially a rendered tree sap, which is said to be pretty gosh darned neutral in flavor, though imparting a subtle pine flavor, and mild bitterness. It’s applied like so, making it somewhat laborious, if, to a practiced hand, apparently a fairly consistent process that indeed produces a pretty much flawless seal.
WHEN WAS THIS A THING?
Fair question, since it seems like all but a dead practice. I’ll skip to the end and tell you what replaced it: stainless steel. It’s absolutely nuts to use a resin-lined wooden cask to store beer, when stainless steel lasts for a massive amount of time if treated well, can hold many times the pressure of casks, imparts no off flavors, is lighter (not as a material, but in vessel form), etc., etc.. Those who still wish to use wood in brewing simply do so - I don’t think anyone going through the effort of using wooden vessels in the 21st century has any interest whatsoever in hiding that flavor from the drinker. So, in a word, the market’s gone.
To put an end date on things, if a rough one, it appears that the Urquell brewery was the last notable lined-cask brewery, and discontinued the practice some time between 1986 and the writing of this article. You can see unlined casks in this video, so I think they made the obvious play and just bailed on the lining.
The harder part is rewinding the clock and finding a beginning. I’m unclear as to the exact start to the practice, but this article suggests that the practice is somewhat new, actually, perhaps as “young” as the early 19th century. I’d need more historical documents to do a more thorough dive, since, because nobody cares about this (including you? Uh oh), the documentation is scarce, and fortunately for you, all of my books from the period are in storage.
The other question we can ask, though, is who used the tech, if not everyone. While “friend of the site” Ron Pattinson posits, backing up his claim with contemporary articles, that the Germans were more likely to line casks than the British, this article kind of...blows that idea up a bit, with a number of commentators echoing, to some degree, the author’s claim that this practice, if not ubiquitous, was absolutely practice throughout the entirety of the UK, at least by 1922.
Indeed, one commentator claimed to have lined “thousands of casks,” and said he thought that “probably there was not a Scottish brewer now who was not using linings.” Interestingly, this vibes very much with the “Germans use lined casks because their beers are more sensitive to those flavors” argument posted in a comment on Pattinson’s post, given the similarities between Scottish and German brewing (remember that one?).
Now, if you’ll allow me to venture some guesses, I’d posit that, from a utilitarian perspective, cask lining is obviously not required to form a water-tight seal, and thus, given the expense and effort, not to mention expertise, required to line casks, I would be surprised if this were common practice before the advent of relatively modern coopering tools, and clean enough lager that this pitch-lining were necessary (side note: I love the exotic, but correct, uses of “were” where “was” would commonly, and mistakenly, be used; here as a shorthand for “would have been;” god forgive me if I misused it here).
Further, since consistency is the hallmark of the modern era, if cask linings were a means to that, that would have provided all the more incentive to use them, so I’m not surprised that: a) usage seems to have started, or at least started to proliferate, around the 19th century, and that; b) stainless steel absolutely decimated the practice.
One last fun anecdote - the book’s in storage, so, forgive me for the paraphrase, but evidently before the adoption of Rum as a means by which to make potable water on sailing vessels, merchant ships used to have to use as much as a third of their available storage space on beer and wine, which would turn to vinegar rather than kill you, which water would. Talk about inefficient!
CONCLUSION
God bless you for making it to the end; if that wasn’t a walk down Esoteric Avenue, I don’t know what was, but hey, now you know where to experience the unmatchable bliss of Cooperage, and what to say to the Cooper when they try to sell you on pitch.
Cheers,
Adrian “that google returned even a single link on this shocked me” Febre
