(machine whirring)
(hammer pounding)
- There's discrepancy between coopers and distillers
of how much flavor comes from the barrel
and how much comes from the actual distilling process.
But we think it's around 80% of the flavor.
But we're the coopers.
(laughing)
This is how our wood comes in over here.
So this is export grade wood.
Has no sap wood, no knots.
It's better than furniture grade quality.
This was cut on 9/21 in 2015.
This is almost five year old wood,
which is unheard of in the barrel industry.
Usually wine barrels are 24 to 36 months.
I mean, we're 36 to 48 months and doing it for whiskey.
That's why we're getting such great flavors.
You can see how gray it is.
The pollen in the air, and the bacteria,
and the molds that grow on this out in the field.
This is aged in Missouri.
Missouri wood produces some of the best flavors
in the United States.
So the rain, the snow,
and it washes those tannins out.
It makes them much more mellow,
produces much better flavor.
This is already planed.
It's convex and concave.
You can see it's the shape.
And then after that,
what he's doing is joining.
Each piece is hand delivered to that machine
and the cutter head moves around the board instead
of the board moving through the machine.
This machine sets up the correct angle for the sides,
for the diameter a barrel,
and it's very accurate from end to end.
White oak,
it's very impervious to rot.
It has what's called a tilos in it
and it will actually seal off the grain of the wood.
It's water tight and it has been used
for aging spirits for hundreds
and thousands of years, really.
(hammer pounding)
We table every single barrel
so that we know the exact sizes.
We lay our staves out on that table in a geometric pattern
so that when we bend barrels,
the pressures are more equal
so that we don't get leaning barrels.
Once we do that,
then we raise that barrel into these skirts,
which is called mise en rose.
We're very particular about what piece
of wood goes into a specific barrel.
So you constantly have to look at it.
(orchestral music)
So now you can see,
that barrel barrel's just sittin' there on its own,
you know.
You could take the hoops off of it
and it'd stay there pretty much.
(hammer pounding)
And by flattening the top and chasing it around,
they're getting it even.
That barrel straightens itself up.
In order to call bourbon bourbon,
it has to be aged in a brand new
American white oak charred barrel.
That is a law.
If you're just making whiskey,
you can use that barrel over and over and over again.
But as a cooperage,
they lobbied to basically to help 'em keep their jobs.
At that point,
we have to heat those barrels to certain temperatures
in order to make 'em pliable that we can bend 'em.
(fire roaring)
We're one of the few cooperages in the country
in the whiskey side or the spirits side
of the industry that fire bend.
Every cooper designs his own crescents.
(fire roaring)
The way you want the heat,
the way they breathe,
and the way they burn.
You know, there's a lot to the crescent itself
that we actually use.
Put the barrel over top of the crescent
and it has to get to a certain temperature in order
to change the structure of the wood
and make it soft enough and pliable enough to bend.
Layers of temperature and heat
is what produces the flavor in them barrels.
We'll come in and we wet these barrels down.
Lets the wood kinda relax a little bit.
(dramatic orchestral music)
Toast is a toast.
It's what it sounds like.
You're browning,
you're actually starting the caramelization process.
You're breaking down the hemicellulose
in the wood to convert into sugars,
which is what the distillers,
the wineries, kombucha makers,
that's what they're looking for is sugars.
It's like Boy Scouts.
You gotta keep the fires goin'.
We use all the scrap wood that we use in here
from making our barrel ends,
use everything.
We put barrels on the fire and we rotate 'em on
so that every single barrel
is on the fire the same exact amount of time.
We use a bender,
a hydraulic press to bend the barrels.
We pull 'em in slowly.
A lot of other cooperages steam bend.
That doesn't do anything for the flavor.
And then they'll just bend it all at once.
We bend 'em slowly.
(upbeat guitar music)
Every cooperage is different.
I'm a stickler on efficiency
and every process leads to the next process.
We have a one-of-a-kind charring process.
Our machine was built in Scotland.
It was originally designed
for recharring used bourbon barrels for the scotch industry.
Our system actually reads real time temperatures.
It's very accurate.
So from barrel to barrel, batch to batch,
I can produce that same char level.
We toast it again.
We burst it into flame.
(dramatic music)
So we tell people that we char our barrels with a dragon.
Different char levels produce different flavors.
(dramatic music)
So the char is really not what creates the flavor.
The char itself opens the wood up
and it also filters any impurities out of that spirit.
So as a barrel heats up,
it expands and it contracts.
When it expands,
it pulls the spirit into the wood.
When it cools,
it shoves back into the barrel.
It's a constant mixing process in and out of the wood
and it's taken the flavors from the breakdown of the wood,
mixing it into their spirit.
As coopers,
we're interested in four compounds.
Lignans, tannins, lactones, and hemicellulose.
The higher your char levels,
the more smoke and more vanillin you're gonna get.
Not much complexity.
The lactones are what creates
those warm caramel coconut bread flavors.
So when you char real high temperatures,
you're burnin' the lactones off.
We find that we get much more complexity out
of our lower char levels.
Then we cool 'em.
So you can see the dragon blowin' flames into the barrel.
After we char then we have to cool that barrel.
And they shrink.
We have to repress that barrel again to tighten it back up.
Then we go to crozing.
We designed all our own croze profiles.
The groove is the same shape as what the barrel head is,
which in turn makes it a machine fit.
Use a wax in our croze.
It's a special wax.
It stays pliable.
It's not, never really gets hard.
So barrels expand and contract quite a bit.
That helps with our leaking process.
(upbeat music)
Once that barrel's crozed,
then we bung bore it.
We center it up on one of the wide staves
and we drill a hole in the side of the barrel.
After we drill the hole,
we cauterize it and that's done with an iron.
You're burning that ingrain because
that engrain can leak around that bung
and you can lose product.
(hammer pounding)
It was Kelly's idea to start this thing.
I don't know what the hell she was thinkin'.
(laughing)
My background has been in woodworking
and construction my whole life.
Built, you know, log cab,
built million dollar homes.
Kelly had gotten a job from Oneida County tourism here
in Utica, New York.
So I sold my construction company and we moved to here.
Keep your fires up.
I did some construction.
Quickly figured out that's not what I wanted to do.
Nor am I get, was I gettin' any younger.
So she come runnin' in the house one night and said,
I know I got it.
I know what we can do.
And she said a cooperage.
We use a double Z group press bit.
You can see there's no glue, or nails, or anything in that.
They're pressed together.
Once we make these blanks then we'll char these.
You have to wet 'em or they shrink and they come apart.
That weight on the top keeps them from curlin'.
- There was a serious barrel shortage.
18 months to get an order of barrels.
And there were no cooperages
in the Northeast United States at the time.
New York State did have cooperages in the past.
But there was this little thing called prohibition
that happened and really,
the cooperages here in the Northeast
just were not able to survive that.
So we were the first to build a new cooperage
in New York State since the 1940s.
- We put our heads in from the top
and we remove all the other hoops.
At that point then we sand that barrel.
We have a big belt sander
and we run that sander and smooth it.
There's more to sanding than just looks.
It actually closes the grain up slightly
and keeps the barrel to the point where it breathes
but yet it's still tight and our customers tell us
that they lose a little bit less in angel's share,
which is evaporation that's comin' out of 'em.
They're gonna yield more product out of that barrel.
We make all our own hooping in house here.
We buy our steel.
It's thicker and it's edge conditioned.
A lot of people get cut handling their barrels.
So we have an edge condition,
which means the edges are neural and not sharp.
So we cut and punch her,
we roll 'em, we splay 'em,
which is beveling them.
And then we revert them together
and then we press 'em on the barrel.
We press everything to the same exact height.
Some cooperages only test a certain percentage of 'em
but we test every single barrel before it comes outta here.
Every barrel we fill with a certain amount of water,
which also rinses anything out of that barrel
from the building process.
Cleans it, hydrates it.
We check it for leaks.
Fix that barrel, sand it off.
Then we know that barrel's ready to go.
- There were lots of factors
that led into the barrel shortage.
A big part of it was the emergence
of new distilleries across the country.
We started looking at what it would take
to put a cooperage together.
A couple challenges along the way,
of course.
The first was really finding anyone
to talk to about barrel making.
There are no schools to learn to be a cooper.
It is still an apprenticeship-style industry.
You literally have to learn from somebody
that knows the skill.
- It's a very tight knit industry.
Every cooperage does things different.
They guard their stuff with their lives.
It's secret what they do.
- We finally found Rick DeFerrari.
He's a master cooper,
owns Oregon Barrel Works.
- Since he was on the West Coast
and I was on the East Coast,
we're not competitive.
He agreed to let me come out.
It's kind of a dying craft
and he would like to see it continue.
But he was very open.
He was very instrumental and taught me
how the basics of barrel building.
And then I took what I learned and created my own processes.
But he did say if I was any closer to him,
he would have never let me come.
After we pressure test it,
then we brand it, label it for char level,
and then we wrap it.
When they don't wrap their barrel completely like that,
the barrels can dry out.
In order to get that barrel to stop leaking,
you have to rehydrate.
You know with ours,
they can long as it's been wrapped,
they can unwrap it, fill it.
Generally, no leaks.
You can pay a lot closer attention to detail.
These other cooperages that are large,
and they're I mean,
they're machine driven.
It's all automated.
But I didn't wanna do that.
I still wanted to be a cooper.
I love workin' with wood.
Always have.
Anything to do with wood,
I like it.
Like I said,
I built million dollar homes and stuff,
but setting up a cooperage and creatin' these barrels
was probably the hardest thing I've ever done.
(soothing music)