thumb|Cooper readies or rounds off the end of a barrel using a cooper's [[Adze|hand adze]]

upright|thumb|Assembly of a barrel, called mise en rose in [[French language|French]]

A cooper is a craftsman who produces wooden casks, barrels, vats, buckets, tubs, troughs, and other similar containers from timber staves that were usually heated or steamed to make them pliable.

Journeymen coopers also traditionally made wooden implements, such as rakes and wooden-bladed shovels. In addition to wood, other materials, such as iron, were used in the manufacturing process. The trade is the origin of the surname Cooper.

Etymology

The word "cooper" is derived from Middle Dutch or Middle Low German kūper 'cooper' from kūpe 'cask', in turn from Latin cupa 'tun, barrel'.

The art and skill of coopering refers to the manufacture of wooden casks, or barrels. The facility in which casks are made is referred to as a cooperage.

History

Traditionally, a cooper is someone who makes wooden, staved vessels, held together with wooden or metal hoops and possessing flat ends or heads. Examples of a cooper's work include casks, barrels, buckets, tubs, butter churns, vats, hogsheads, firkins, tierces, rundlets, puncheons, pipes, tuns, butts, troughs, pins and breakers.

A hooper was the man who fitted the wooden or metal hoops around the barrels or buckets that the cooper had made, essentially an assistant to the cooper. The English name Hooper is derived from that profession. Over time, coopers took on the role of the hooper themselves.

Antiquity

thumb|Cooper's workshop, [[Roscheider Hof Open Air Museum]]

An Egyptian wall-painting in the tomb of Hesy-Ra, dating to 2600 BC, shows a wooden tub made of staves, bound together with wooden hoops, and used to measure. Another Egyptian tomb painting dating to 1900 BC shows a cooper and tubs made of staves in use at the grape harvest. Palm-wood casks were reported in use in ancient Babylon. In Europe, buckets and casks dating to 200 BC have been found preserved in the mud of lake villages. A lake village near Glastonbury dating to the late Iron Age has yielded one complete tub and a number of wooden staves.

The Roman historian Pliny the Elder reports that cooperage in Europe originated with the Gauls in Alpine villages where they stored their beverages in wooden casks bound with hoops. Pliny identified three types of coopers: ordinary coopers, wine coopers and coopers who made large casks. Large casks contained more and longer staves and were correspondingly more difficult to assemble. Roman coopers tended to be independent tradesmen, passing their skills on to their sons. The Greek geographer Strabo records wooden pithoi (casks) were lined with pitch to stop leakage and preserve the wine. Barrels were sometimes used for military purposes. Julius Caesar used catapults to hurl barrels of burning tar into towns under siege to start fires.

Empty casks were used to line the walls of shallow wells from at least Roman times. Such casks were found in 1897 during archaeological excavation of Roman Silchester in Britain. They were made of Pyrenean silver fir and the staves were one and a half inches thick and featured grooves where the heads fitted. They had Roman numerals scratched on the surface of each stave to help with reassembly.

After the Battle of Hastings in 1066, when the Normans started settling in England, much wine was shipped over the English Channel from France.]]

thumb|Coopering of casks on a dock for a [[whaler ]]

On ships

Ships, in the age of sail, provided much work for coopers. They made water and provision casks, the contents of which sustained crew and passengers on long voyages. They also made barrels to contain high-value commodities, such as wine and sugar. The proper stowage of casks on ships about to sail was an important stevedoring skill. Casks of various sizes were used to accommodate the sloping walls of the hull and make maximum use of limited space. Casks also had to be tightly packed, to ensure they did not move during the voyage and endanger the ship, crew and cask contents.

Whaling ships in particular, featuring long voyages and large crews, needed many casks – for salted meat, other provisions and water – and to store the whale oil. Sperm whale oil was a particularly difficult substance to contain, due to its highly viscous nature, and oil coopers were perhaps the most skilled tradesmen in pre-industrial cooperage. Whaling ships usually carried a cooper on board, to assemble shooks (disassembled barrels) and maintain casks. In the 16th century, the company won the right for coopers to be independent from breweries. The practice continued well into the 20th century.

Prior to the mid-20th century, the cooper's trade flourished in the United States; a dedicated trade journal was published, the National Cooper's Journal, with advertisements from firms that supplied everything from barrel staves to purpose-built machinery.

After the Industrial Revolution at the turn of the 19th century and prohibition in the United States in the early 20th century, there was less demand for barrels, and over time, various other containers were manufactured for shipping goods, including shipping containers, metal drums, and corrugated cardboard. Storing, shipping, and fermenting alcohol became the main uses for wooden barrels.

  • White coopering, creating pails, butter churns, tubs, When he appealed for apprentices, there were many applications, but the government's insistence that trainees should attend a university killed off a lot of the interest. Subsequently, there has been a resurgence of craft breweries and English winemakers employing coopers. Simms had an apprentice by November 2015. He still uses the traditional tools, including a croze which he estimates is over 250 years old.

In the United States, there are also few master coopers left. Ramiro Herrera, Master Cooper for Caldwell Vineyard in the Napa Valley, was sent to France to learn his trade, where only two out of 40 starters completed the four-year training course. It takes him around 11 hours to build a barrel, before it is ready to be toasted.

Recycling casks is common in the trade, and wine casks may be converted to contain beer. Centuries-old tools remain the preferred tool of the master cooper. Several cooperages have closed in the 21st century, and, while there is a need for new coopers, there has been no pathway to the trade via apprenticeships since 1996, when the Howard government reformed the apprenticeship scheme to focus particularly on construction, food and hospitality, and hairdressing. In January 2024, it was reported that there was only one winery left in Australia still making its own barrels for storing wine, and there were fewer than 100 people still making barrels at small cooperages for other purposes. Some cooperages, such as the Margaret River Cooperage in Margaret River, Western Australia, do not make new barrels, but recooper imported barrels for use by small wineries. Fifty of them are grouped together in the French Cooperage Federation (Fédération française de tonnellerie), created in 1978, and represent 90% of French production. They are mainly located in the five major wine-growing basins.