No one at Tucson’s Hamilton Distillers knows exactly what wood the cognac barrels holding whiskey are made of.
“Probably Spanish oak?” one employee ventures a guess. The age of the barrels is also a question mark. No one working here is old enough to vouch for that; the distillery believes they are anywhere from 100 to 125 years old, which is old in the grand scheme of barrels’ lifespans, but not unusual. But it can say with certainty, using records of its vintages, that these barrels are on their fifth use – at least.
In the alcohol industry, when ageing liquor can easily take decades, the vessels that house them can also become more covetable over the years. In an age of disposable materials and dire news of plastics polluting our environment, reused wooden barrels exist in stark contrast. The lives of barrels are long, shockingly sustainable and currently imperiled by trade war.
Many circumnavigate the globe and end their days in distilleries in remote corners of the world, originating in the forests of Hungary and moving from mountain towns in Canada to distilleries in the Caribbean and Mexico. At Hamilton, new American oak barrels hold fresh distillate, alongside the dinosaurs: French cognac barrels that show their age. They’re gray, stained and a little warped.
Laws Whiskey House in Denver, Colorado, considers itself a “terroir-forward distillery”, the distillery’s brand manager, Casey Rizzo, told me over the phone. Terroir, the flavor that emerges from a specific environment, comes from both grain and barrels. “White American oak has a lot of natural wood sugars and natural vanillin. When you’re charring a barrel, you’re caramelizing it like a creme brulee. A barrel pulls whiskey in and then pushes it back out. Whiskey goes into the barrel clear and comes out with all that color, and vanilla and caramel flavors.”
Rizzo added: “We think of barrels as teabags. It gets used first for bourbon, like the first steep of a teabag. You get a lot of color and flavor from the barrel quickly. If you use the barrel again, it’ll take longer to impart, so maybe it’s used for scotch, which sits and ages longer. You mute the barrel’s flavors along the way.”
Modern distilling relies on increasingly sophisticated technologies for monitoring conditions in cellars and fermentation, but distilleries still depend on lo-tech barrels to impart flavor and color to their products. Barrels consist only of wood and steel hardware, held together with no glue or nails. Remove its rings and give it a smack, and a barrel can unfurl like a chocolate orange. At some distilleries, employees still rotate their barrels by hand, a practice called clocking (rolling barrels according to a clock’s face). “This ensures proper exposure to the varying temperatures within the warehouse and adds consistency from barrel to barrel,” said Frank Krockenberger, director of hospitality for Loretto, Kentucky’s Star Hill Farm, home of the Maker’s Mark distillery.
It was one stop on my journey to follow how barrels – so important for the beverage industry – are made. As a food and beverage writer, much of my work dredges up stories about monumental food waste, and the struggle to repurpose materials. But when it came to barrels, I found practices that were surprisingly sustainable, of wood being reused for centuries, and forests being protected.
How to make a wine barrel
Just as Kentucky is the epicenter of bourbon, so too is it the headquarters of bourbon barrel production. An hour away from Maker’s Mark, in Louisville, I witnessed the birth of American oak barrels at the Brown-Forman Cooperage, which produced barrels exclusively for the Cooper’s Craft and Jack Daniel’s brands, at least in terms of their first use (however, the cooperage recently closed, with the Kentucky Distillers’ Association citing changing consumer trends, European Union tariffs and taxes as reasons for the industry’s decline).
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