From Apprentice to Master: Bringing Back Traditional Household Coopering | Killian O'Mahony

Say 100 years ago, how many different types of vessels and things that were made by coopers, how many would you find in a typical household?

Most common everyday vessels, like up to the mid-1800s, there was apparently 11,000 coopers in Ireland.

11,000 lads swinging a hammer every day and making all sorts of vessels.

So there was a couple of factions of coopering.

Wet coopering, which would be what we now know mainly, which is for distilleries, wineries.

There was dry coopering, which would have been containing dry goods in a vessel, like just for transport, apples, flour, nails, gunpowder even in some cases.

So you had to have each faction dealing with each type of coopering.

Brewery coopering is also its own faction because you're dealing with compressed, I suppose, highly carbonate pressure-raised liquids, or your staves are thicker, you use brass bushings.

There's these little intricacies between the trade.

but household coopering or what was called then white coopering is the making of all types of vessels for the household so like i have a plunge turn back here which is literally going up and down inside the vessel to turn butter you have miniature casks miniature barrels for all types of stuff i have a couple of vessels up here for one liter tankards literally just drinking vessels but you would have had traditions in ireland where does the thing called a newlywed couple docket where you go down to the local family cooperage and you would hand in the newlywed docket and the cooperage would make the newlyweds there they'd have two pails or sorry two noggins two gills which are small little vessels dairy vessels for scooping milk and stuff like that you would have had a eight liter or under a 10 liter plunge it's kind of domestic size you would have had a wash tub um and everything because we're very used to a world thing of like obviously plastics and glass and cellophane and tupperware but we're used to a world where we have where we have pallets, where we have shipping containers, where we can box things up and lift extraordinary weight and put it on a ship and send it across.

Whereas coopering was created out of necessity, the need to hold things, the need to transport things.

If you know the clay amphoras that you would have seen in Rome, they're big.

clay pot and they were literally the only technology that was there before for carrying mass volume of things so just to dive deeper into the history of it and sorry i'm rambling on but when rome invaded gaul in france what we know as france today they discovered celtic tribes that were actually creating and binding staves together using hazel hoops so if you recognize the barrel you see each individual piece of wood is a stave and the hoops around it are these pieces of metal here but traditionally they were actually wooden hoops as well so when Rome invaded Gaul found the Celts making these casks 250 liter traditional hogshead styles that's when coopering technology was really taken on and spread across the world it was the Roman Empire now being able to move massive amounts of liquid wine beer water whatever they needed to their armors to their people to grow the empire so that's really what what blew it up and then obviously the the necessity to transport stuff around the world you could then roll it onto a cart over onto a ship and ship that to another country or another continent so it was really the backbone of of trade and i suppose human evolution and civilization in a way

Do you think that, you know, in the world we live in today where people are starting to worry about even drinking things out of plastic and, you know, just moving into a greener technology, do you think people are, is this coopering, is your coopering trade increasing now because of that? Yeah.

Do you know what? It's such a note that I didn't even think about until we really started or after we started the family business because everything here that we're doing is truly about the trade and bringing back the vessels.