Barrel

A barrel or cask is a hollow

Modern wooden barrels for wine-making are made of French common oak (Quercus robur), white oak (Quercus petraea), American white oak (Quercus alba), more exotic is mizunara oak (Quercus crispula),^[5] and recently Oregon oak (Quercus garryana) has been used.^[6] Someone who makes traditional wooden barrels is called a

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, used to measure wheat.^[8] Another Egyptian tomb painting dating to 1900 BC shows a cooper and tubs made of staves in use at the grape harvest.^[9] Palm-wood casks were also 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.^[10] 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 reported that cooperage in Europe originated with the Gauls in Alpine villages where they stored their beverages in wooden casks bound with hoops.^[11] Pliny identified three different types of coopers: ordinary coopers, wine coopers and coopers who made large casks.^[12] Large casks contain more and bigger staves and are correspondingly more difficult to assemble. Roman coopers tended to be independent tradesmen, passing their skills on to their sons. The Greek geographer Strabo recorded that wooden pithoi (barrels) were lined with pitch to stop leakage and preserve the wine.^[13]

Barrels were sometimes used for military purposes.

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 in Britain of Roman Silchester. They were made of Pyrenean silver fir and the staves were 38 mm (1.5 in) thick and featured grooves where the heads fitted. They had Roman numerals scratched on the surface of each stave to help with reassembly.^[14]

In

Uses today

Beverage maturing

This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

An "ageing barrel" is used to

Sherry is stored in 600-litre (130 imp gal; 160 US gal) casks made of North American oak, which is slightly more porous than French or Spanish oak. The casks, or butts, are filled five-sixths full, leaving "the space of two fists" empty at the top to allow flor to develop on top of the wine. Sherry is also commonly swapped between barrels of different ages, a process that is known as solera.

Spirits

Whiskey

Laws in several jurisdictions require that whiskey be aged in wooden barrels. The law in the United States requires that "straight whiskey" (with the exception of corn whiskey) must be stored for at least two years in new, charred oak containers.^[17] Other forms of whiskey aged in used barrels cannot be called "straight".^[17]

International laws require any whisky bearing the label "Scotch" to be distilled and matured in Scotland for a minimum of three years and one day in oak casks.^[18]

By Canadian law,^[19] Canadian whiskies must "be aged in small wood for not less than three years", and "small wood" is defined as a wood barrel not exceeding 700 litres (150 imp gal; 180 US gal) capacity.

Since the U.S. law requires the use of new barrels for several popular types of whiskey, which is not typically considered necessary elsewhere, whiskey made elsewhere is usually aged in used barrels that previously contained American whiskey (usually bourbon whiskey). The typical bourbon barrel is 53 US gallons (200 L; 44 imp gal) in size, which is thus the de facto standard whiskey barrel size worldwide.^[20][21] Some distillers transfer their whiskey into different barrels to "finish" or add qualities to the final product. These finishing barrels frequently aged a different spirit (such as rum) or wine. Other distillers, particularly those producing Scotch, often disassemble five used bourbon barrels and reassemble them into four casks with different barrel ends for aging Scotch, creating a type of cask referred to as a hogshead.^[22]

Brandy

Maturing is very important for a good

Some types of tequila are aged in oak barrels to mellow its flavor. "Reposado" tequila is aged for a period of two months to one year, "Añejo" tequila is aged for up to three years, and "Extra Añejo" tequila is aged for at least three years. Like with other spirits, longer aging results in a more pronounced flavor.

Beer

Traditional balsamic vinegar is aged in a series of wooden barrels.

Tabasco sauce

The pepper mash used to make Tabasco sauce is aged for three years in previously used oak whiskey barrels since its invention in 1868.^[23][24]

Soft drinks

Vernors ginger ale is marketed as having a "barrel-aged" flavor, and the syrup used to produce the beverage was originally aged in oak barrels when first manufactured in the 19th century.^[25] Whether the syrup continues to be aged in oak is unclear.^[25]

Angels' share

"Angels' share" is a term for the portion (share) of a wine or

Water barrels are often used to collect the rainwater from dwellings (so that it may be used for irrigation or other purposes). This usage, known as rainwater harvesting, requires (besides a large rainwater barrel or water butt) adequate (waterproof) roof-covering and an adequate rain pipe.

Oil storage

Wooden casks of various sizes were used to store

Wooden casks were also used to store mineral oil. The standard size

Earlier, another size of whiskey barrel was the most common size; this was the 40 US gallons (33.3 imp gal; 151.4 L) barrel for proof spirits, which was of the same volume as five US bushels. However, by 1866, the oil barrel was standardized at 42 US gallons.

Oil has not been shipped in barrels^[28] since the introduction of oil tankers, but the 42 US gallon size is still used as a unit of measurement for pricing and tax and regulatory codes. Each barrel is refined into about 20 US gallons (17 imp gal; 76 L) of gasoline,^[29] the rest becoming other products such as jet fuel and heating oil, using fractional distillation.^[30]

Barrel shape, construction and parts

Barrels have a convex shape and bulge at their center, called bilge. This facilitates

Casks used for ale or beer have shives and keystones in their openings. Before serving the beer, a spile is hammered into the shive and a tap into the keystone.^{[citation needed]}

The wooden parts that make up a barrel are called staves, the top and bottom are both called heads or headers, and the rings that hold the staves together are called hoops. These are usually made of galvanized iron, though historically they were made of flexible bits of wood called withies. While wooden hoops could require barrels to be "fully hooped", with hoops stacked tightly together along the entire top and bottom third of a barrel, iron-hooped barrels only require a few hoops on each end.^{[31][page needed]}

Wine barrels typically come in two hoop configurations. An American barrel features six hoops, from top to center: head- or chime hoop, quarter hoop and bilge hoop (times two), while a French barrel features eight, including a so-called French hoop, located between the quarter- and bilge hoops (see "wine barrel parts" illustration).^{[citation needed]}

The opening at the center of a barrel is called a

A barrel is one of several

The modern US beer barrel is 31 US gallons (117.34777 L), half a gallon less than the traditional wine barrel. (26 U.S.C. §5051[34])

Dry goods

Barrels are also used as a unit of measurement for dry goods (dry groceries), such as flour or produce. Traditionally, a barrel is 196 pounds (89 kg) of flour (wheat or rye), with other substances such as pork subject to more local variation. In modern times, produce barrels for all dry goods, excepting cranberries, contain 7,056 cubic inches, about 115.627 L.^[35]

In the northeastern United States, nails, bolts, and plumbing fittings were commonly shipped in small rough barrels. These were small, 18 inches high by about 10–12 inches in diameter. The wood was the quality of pallet lumber. The binding was sometimes by wire or metal hoops or both. This practice seems to have been prevalent up till the 1980s. Older hardware stores probably still have some of these barrels.^{[citation needed]}

See also

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Barrels.

Look up barrel or cask in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Barrel" . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.