Tag Archives: bourbon barrels

Roll Out the Barrel

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In Lynchburg, Tennessee, a steady procession of black box trucks bearing Jack Daniel’s name commences at six in the morning, ferrying barrels to and from warehouses located miles from the distillery. At Buffalo Trace the warehouses are clustered around the cistern room and connected by a system of parallel rails that use gravity to get the job done. Barrel rollers heave the barrels onto the track then push them in groups of fifteen to twenty toward one warehouse or another. If this batch is going to the third floor, then the barrels are loaded five at a time into a freight elevator. On the third floor they’re rolled from the elevator to the ricker, a four-foot-square platform mounted on a hydraulic lift. Each barrel is lifted to the man kneeling on the platform and the two in turn are lifted to the empty tier and the worker “sets” the barrel. All the barrels in a warehouse are resting “money side up” or with the bung hole topside to guard against leaking and to provide access to the barrel’s contents. Straight up noon is the goal but variance toward one o’clock or eleven o’clock is tolerated. Cheat sheets are sometimes written on the end of ricks. “Start bung, 9 o’clock.” So if the man on the platform sets the first barrel so that the bung hole points to 9 o’clock, then the barrel will roll the 26 feet to the end of the rick and stop money side up. The second barrel will be set at 10 o’clock, and so on.

Barrel rollers have noticeable biceps and are good at their job. One of the most popular events at the annual Kentucky Bourbon Festival in Bardstown is the barrel rolling competition, the whiskey maker’s version of rodeo. Both male and female teams from each distillery compete against each other for time and skill at rolling the money side up.

“It takes us four hours to roll about 380 barrels to the warehouse and rick ‘em,” Obie Kemper told me. After working decades at Buffalo Trace he’s retired now but showed me around the distillery on a visit pre-retirement. “Sometimes we have women choose the warehouse,” he says, “and I tell you, they’re healthy women. We used to have crews of leak hunters but the barrels have got so much better we don’t have to do much of that anymore.”

One week Kemper retrieves samples from “every day of October whiskey” and the next week he’s on to November whiskey. Armed with a small rechargeable drill, a cedar plug, and an empty bottle he drills a quarter-inch hole, fills the bottle, and pushes in the plug within a minute or two, never spilling a drop.

In other decades retrieving a sample meant prying open the bung hole and inserting a bourbon thief to draw out a taste. A bourbon thief, also called a whiskey thief since it’s also used by Scottish and Irish distillers, is a hollow copper tube two to three feet long, about two inches in diameter. One end is capped and the other is open. The capped end is centered with a small hole that one covers with the thumb after the thief has been inserted into a barrel through the bung hole. The thief is withdrawn and when the hole is uncovered the whiskey runs out the open end, like a simple straw siphon. A thief was once a daily tool and now considered an antique.

Kemper is trim and muscular and has a reputation as a pretty good barrel dancer. For years he performed at the Bourbon Festival with a 500-pound partner on a small wooden stage about eight feet square. With the first few notes of Sweet Georgia Brown, Kemper set the rhythm then twirled and bounced the barrel like it was nothing. You can see him giving a casual twirl at Buffalo Trace at youtube.com/watch?v=WUzFlTKN22U.

It’s All in the Barrel

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Barrels are more than packaging – they’re critical to the process of aging new whiskey. Once white dog is in the wood, the congeners, or toxins, generated during mashing and fermentation and retained during distillation, engage in a synergistic partnership with properties of the barrel wood; and with air and wind, cold months and hot ones, rainy days and drought, and with time itself. The raw, grainy white dog that entered the barrel clear as water emerges years later as an amber liquid suitable for sipping.

Federal regulations dictate that bourbon must be aged in new, charred, oak barrels. So, once they’re emptied of bourbon, most barrels are sold to distilleries in other countries and used for aging other products. Ninety-eight per cent of all Scotch is aged in bourbon wood as well as a few dark rums and tequilas. American white oak, or quercus albus to be specific, is the tight-grained hardwood used for bourbon barrels. White oak contains a substance called tyloses that naturally blocks the sap-conducting pores of the wood, giving it the right porosity for holding the whiskey while at the same time allowing it to breathe, which oxidizes and evaporates the congeners. A 53-gallon barrel is standard to the industry.

When I talked to Jimmy Banks in 2003, his job was visiting sawmills all over the country buying white oak wood that’s 75 to 100 years old for Bluegrass Cooperage. He carries a 14-inch hatchet in his briefcase. “You got to get into the wood,” he explains. The skin on his hands was thick as leather and he used a thumbnail to groove the piece of wood he held while explaining that the heads are flat sawn but the staves are quarter sawn to get the proper orientation of the growth rings and grain for maximum strength and leak resistance. “It’s bastard sawn if it exceeds 45 degrees,” he says.

The rough boards are sawed to a thickness of 15/16 of an inch and the soft outer layers of sapwood are ground off. The grinding eats up a lot of wood but the process is important because a sappy stave will taint the bourbon. The boards start out with a thickness of 5/4. “That’s 5/4,” clarified Banks, “not one and a quarter.”

The boards are stacked and seasoned for up to a year in open air but this time frame varies with distillery specifications. As it dries, the wood stabilizes by giving up moisture and lingering sap. After air-drying, the wood is kiln-dried then cut into staves for the sides and planks for the heads. The staves are shaped wider in the middle than at the ends and wider at the top than at the bottom to create the bilge of the barrel and make it liquid-tight.

The cut staves are ready for the coopers. “Raising” the barrel requires skill and experience. The cooper eyes and selects staves one by one as he begins standing them on end inside the circle of a heavy iron truss hoop lying on the floor. The bung stave, which will accommodate the bunghole, is the widest at four inches and it goes in first. The cooper snugs each one tightly to the next until the circle is complete with twelve to fourteen staves. The loose ends are pulled together with a temporary hoop and the barrel is placed on a conveyor that moves it to the steam box. A good cooper raises about 270 barrels a day.

Sometimes an exceptional cooper comes along. When one Charles Harden did this job at Bluegrass Cooperage, he raised 450 to 500 barrels every day, prompting a colleague named Spitty to observe “that boy’s not gonna last long.” Other coopers theorize that Harden could do this because he simply never made a mistake in his selection of staves. If they’re not fitting right, the staves are pulled out and the process begins again. Harden never had to start over.

The steam makes the wood pliable so the top end can be windlassed, or drawn together as tightly as the bottom end. This process bends the staves into the familiar bilge shape. The open-ended barrels are placed upright and conveyed into the toasting room. The insides are first toasted with a heated instrument for about 30 minutes to remove the surface moisture acquired in the steam box. The toasting also caramelizes the natural wood sugars. These sugars will leach into the bourbon during aging and flavor it with traces of caramel and vanilla.

When the barrels have toasted enough, the truss hoops are tightened and the barrel insides are literally set on fire for about 12 seconds to char. The depth of charring varies among distilleries with some preferring a light or medium char and others going for the deepest char, identified as a number 4. The heads are charred separately and placed on the barrel ends and the permanent quarter and bilge hoops are placed.

The barrels are cooled for an hour and all the hoops are tightened. The bung hole is bored and each barrel tested with a pressurized blast of water. Any showing leakage are turned back to hand coopers for repair. Charles Harden moved on to hand coopering.