Coopering means to do the work of a cooper. A cooper makes or repairs casks, which is a skill that takes many years to learn.

An apprenticeship would last four to five years, although you would have a hard job becoming a coopers apprentice these days. Apprentices usually started at the age of fourteen and then worked as a cooper for the rest of there lives.

A cooper would work in a cooperage. In the cooperage the cooper would use many different traditional tools including:

Dowelling stock, side-axe, bick iron, round shave, Topping plane, chive, Croze, bung-hole borer, hammer, driver, flagging iron, adze, diagonals, heading knife, jigger, hollowing knife, buzz, swift, downright and a inside shave.

Many of the tools were short handled to enable accurate one handed use, the other hand is free to support the cask.

Traditional cask capacities
Pin - 4.5 gallons
Firkin - 9 gallons
Kilderkin - 18 gallons
Barrel - 36 gallons
Hogshead - 54 gallons
Puncheon - 72 gallons
Butt - 108 gallons

If the cooper was making a larger cask, like the 108 gallon Butt, it would be difficult to hold the staves together by hand. In these circumstances the cooper would use a windlass. A windlass would have hemp ropes and would be operated by hand.

Why use wood?
Oak casks breath, allowing an exchange between the air outside and the contents. This results in some of the contents being lost but this also allows the contents to mature. In the UK whisky has to mature for at least three years.

Both the top and the bottom of a cask is called a head. The heads are made from boards that have been dowelled together, cut out with a bow saw and then shaved smooth.