Thread: Coopering - and rum

Rum tastes like cough mixture anyway.

Originally Posted by China

Rum tastes like cough mixture anyway.

amen

I have always thought they were the same thing.ï

You're all drinking the wrong rum.

Originally Posted by jpdv

The head cooper has apparently been there since 1970, and the trade is now dying out. He and a team of 4 take 2 days to construct a new large barrel (not the normal sized ones, but the vats they hold the rum in before it goes into smaller barrels to be flavoured).

Part of the advertising states things like 'aged in oak,' which implies a barrel. I dare say there are other methods to impart flavour/character to a wine or spirit. Would we be as keen to buy a bottle if the label noted, 'aged using additive X25545' or similar? I doubt it. I suspect coopers will always have a job.

Originally Posted by jpdv

I took part in a family day out to the Bundaberg distillery,

The head cooper has apparently been there since 1970, and the trade is now dying out. He and a team of 4 take 2 days to construct a new large barrel (not the normal sized ones, but the vats they hold the rum in before it goes into smaller barrels to be flavoured) - holds about 20,000 L. That earns the team around $100k... The vats can last 100 years, with no mechanical fasteners used at all.

The other interesting point was that they use American white oak for these vats, specifically Appalachian oak. They tried using Australian hardwoods, but the eucalypt in the wood meant that the rum came out tasting like cough mixture.

Where was your camera ? Some pictures would have been good.

$100K for a 20,000 liter container that took 4 days to assemble? Or make from scratch?

There's possibly 4 days machining, or more than that for 4 guys preparing the wood I would think.


Rob

I saw this video at the Guinness brewery in Dublin some years ago which shows the amazing skills of their coopers.
Producing Guiness barrels long time ago! - YouTube

Originally Posted by ErrolFlynn

Part of the advertising states things like 'aged in oak,' which implies a barrel. I dare say there are other methods to impart flavour/character to a wine or spirit. Would we be as keen to buy a bottle if the label noted, 'aged using additive X25545' or similar? I doubt it. I suspect coopers will always have a job.

I did see on a video one day that they do a lot of wine/ spirits in stainless steel vats with very thin strips of oak timber suspended in them. This gives it the tannins from the wood without the cost of wood barrels.
Rgds,
Crocy.

Yup, sorry, no cameras, or even car electric fobs, allowed in - ignition hazard...

I got the impression it was 4 days 'soup to nuts', but the girls giving the tour weren't focused on woodworking, so much as rum making, so I couldn't tease it out of them. But they were definitely very impressive, properly coopered giant vats - over 150 of them. The oak for that is 'nude', as it were. Then, after the required 2 years in them, they decant it into more normal barrels acquired from port/brandy/whiskey distillers, which gives the rum its distinct flavour. Interesting stuff.

They also have about 4 giant low lying 'molasses wells' - magnificent hardwood trussed 'barns' dug down about 3 M into the ground, which the molasses from the adjacent sugar mill are pumped into to await brewing. 5 million litres in the one we walked through. Extraordinary smelling. I found the lifebelt on the wall a triumph of hope (and OH&S) over reality - fall into that treacly goo and you probably won't come out...

Imagine what is in the bottom of those molasses vats....

Originally Posted by jpdv

. I found the lifebelt on the wall a triumph of hope (and OH&S) over reality - fall into that treacly goo and you probably won't come out...

You might find it difficult to sink, it has about the same density as the Dead Sea. A bigger problem is the rum vats. I was born in Bundaberg and my great grandfather fell into one of them and try as his coworkers might, he fought them off bravely 😁

This is a topic with which I am very familiar, as I have exposure to this industry.

Coppering as a wood craft is virtually dead. However, as an industry, it is huge. The reason is as follows: in the USA, laws say that all Bourbon must be aged in new American White Oak. There are huge companies that own and manage huge oak plantations, mill, and process billions of tonnes of oak for the sole purpose of making whisky barrels. Once used, after 3 to 7 years, these barrels are broken down into their staves and sorted. The good staves are packed into shipping containers and shipped in mass to Scotland, the Caribbean, South America, and Japan. To be used in the whisky and rum industries.

Why? You ask, When you drink bourbon, you get those super sweet cinnamon and vanilla notes. This is totally due to the new American oak. These intense flavours are not wanted in whisky and rum, so these producers use second-fill ex-bourbon barrels to age their product for more mute and refined flavours. These second-fill barrels are then used for 3 to 20 years for ageing before being broken down again and reused. The broken staves are being chipped and resold for smoking chips.

So many distilleries in Scotland, the Caribbean, and South America have a crew that refurbishes these barrels but does little new barrel-making. There are just too many first-fill barrels coming out of the USA to make it worth while, and the flavour notes are wrong for the industry.

Now in Australia, we have a unique trend. Due to our huge wine industry, many distilleries use ex-wine barrels to age our spirits, and this is why many Australian whiskies and rums have a tannin, red wine note. However, most of these wine barrels are either coming out of the USA or Europe again from massive barrel factories.

American White Oak has a very different flavour from European White Oak, and industry and consumers expect certain flavours for specific products produced in specific barrels.

There are many laws in the industry about what kind of barrel, in terms of wood and size, can be used. However, these rules are relaxing as makers seek to diversify their product offerings with new flavour profiles.

There is a niche industry of very small copper companies making non-traditional barrels from stuff like Japanese oak, Australian acacias, and others, again chasing unique flavours. With the growth of home distilling, many home distillers are making only 5 or 10 litres of white spirit at a time. A 300-litre barrel is not feasible. So there is a growing community of DIY barrel solutions being produced.

If you are looking for easy woodworking money, then small-scale barrels are a boom industry.

The problem with a small 10-litre barrel compared to a 300-litre barrel is that the volume to surface area is massively larger in the tiny barrels, causing the tiny barrels to over-oak and colour the spirit before it can age and mellow r oxidize. To solve this, barrels are being made from a combination of stainless steel and a small amount of wood to achieve the right balance for ageing.

So a 10 litre barrel will colour and flavour white spirit in 2 weeks; a 3000 litre barrel could hold white spirit for 100 years with little change due to the relative surface area.

Oak Chips suspended in wine vats is quite a common procedure to add complexity without having oak barrels.

I am talking solely about distillation.

Oak chips are common in home distillation and brewing; however, the end product is light years apart from a barrel-aged spirit. This is why no commercial distillery uses this method; only home distillers do it.

Legally using wood chips would not allow you to label your product as rum, whisky, or brandy. The law is very strict: X number of years in X type and size of wooden barrel; otherwise, you cannot market the product.

A sealed glass or stainless steel vessel with chips gives you colour and some oak flavours. However, there is no oxygen exchange and no oxidative chemistry.

In a wooden barrel, atmospheric pressure causes the wood to absorb water and ethanol, and complex chemistry is facilitated via atmospheric oxygen exchange. All while being filtered through the carbon matrix of the barrel char.

Chips just cannot do this. This is why all serious home distillers eventually move to some kind of wooden barrel, no matter how small the size of the barrel.

Now there is some big science money being spent on artificially inducing a barrel-aged spirit in record time using sonic waves, forced oxygen injection, atmospheric chambers, and sci-fi contraptions. However, this has mostly come to naught.

Ageing spirits in barrels is the biggest money-loss aspect of the whisky and rum industries. If they could take it off the shelf and ship it out the next day, the profits would be 1,000 times greater. This is why Gin, Vodka, Grappa, and Ouzo are so much cheaper than aged spirits. And why is a 20-year-old aged spirit from Scotland triple the price of a 20-year-old aged spirit from South America due to labour and storage costs? One of the best rums I ever had, El-Dorado, was over 18 years old from Guyana and cost me the same as cheap Australian rum aged a mere 2 years. But my god, you can taste every extra minute in the age.

The other beauty of wooden barrels is that the environment in which they live can produce extremely divergent end results. A barrel aged in southern India with its high humidity, versus a barrel aged in Scotland with its cold, versus a barrel aged in Melbourne, Australia, with its rapid climatic fluctuations, will give each product a unique end result. It is almost as if the barrel absorbs the flavour of the land and its people. This is also why some places are just better for ageing than others.

I could make an analogy between a young girl and a mature woman. Many things get better with age and cannot be faked. For the forceful future, wooden barrels will remain king in industry.