Craftsmanship and Coopers Art of Barrels

Eight skilled men, wearing dusty dungarees, stand around the giant wooden barrel. Big enough to hold over 7,000 pints of beer, they’ve spent two months building it; selecting the Czech-grown oak, carving it into perfect curves, piecing it together stave by stave, crashing heavy hammers down on the seven-foot structure. This team of brewery coopers – the last left in Central Europe – build and maintain wooden barrels for Pilsner Urquell, the brewers of the world’s first golden lager in 1842.
This historic new beer was brewed in copper tanks using soft Pilsen water, local pale malted barley and aromatic Czech Saaz hops, then transferred into wooden barrels for it to mature in cold cellars. When ready, five weeks later, it moved into smaller barrels to be sent to pubs and was served straight from the wood.
The brewery once employed hundreds of coopers and it was their job to repair old barrels and build new ones, working constantly to ensure each barrel, large or small, was perfect for the beer. Back then wood was the only way to do it so their job was integral to the brewery.
But things changed and the craft of coopering started to decline when steel tanks began to replace battered old barrels. When Pilsner Urquell made the move into stainless steel, they made an important decision: to continue to make some beer like they had since 1842 and use wooden barrels, keeping the coopers and continuing their craft in the Czech Republic.
Today they build a range of barrels from 25 litres up to 4,000 litres; the smaller ones still go to bars where they’ll pour unfiltered Pilsner Urquell (a rare treat in the beer world), while the large barrels move into cellars beneath the brewery to be filled with beer. These cold, old cellars stretch for 9km, up to 12 metres underground. They took 80 years to carve to their completion and were once used to store all of the beer brewed.
The wood is Czech-grown oak, mostly from the area surrounding the picturesque Krivoklat Castle, which lies halfway between Pilsen and Prague. With shallow soil on a rocky base, the trees grow slowly and produce relatively unknotted wood. When the tree is felled it’s delivered to a warehouse close to the coopers’ workshop, where it’s left to dry for a further eight years before the Head Cooper, Josef Hruza, will select the perfect staves.
Away from the huge hammers and loud lathes, there’s also fine detailed work done in the cooperage, where they make barrel tops, delicately carved by hand, and small wooden tankards, pieced together like dolls houses, with each decorated with a seal and the name of the cooper who built it, a celebration of his craftsmanship.
Being the last brewery cooperage in Central Europe, there’s an apprentice scheme in place and it’s an incredibly important aspect of their survival because coopering isn’t taught in carpentry classes. Instead, Pilsner Urquell take experienced carpenters and retrain them with the new skills the need to build barrels, making them responsible for their own futures.
Today all the beer is still brewed in copper vessels, it still uses local water and Czech malt and Saaz hops, as it always has been made, and some of the beer is still transferred into wooden barrels. Go to the brewery in Pilsen and you can drink the beer direct from those barrels, barrels made by the eight skilled men keeping the craft of the cooper alive.
Mark Dredge, award winning beer and food writer.