The story of the barrel is told in the book Cask Strength by Mike Gerrard, publisher of Travel Distilled, with the history of the cask and barrel-aging for beer, wine, whisky, rum and more.
My book Cask Strength: the Story of the Barrel, the Secret Ingredient in your Drink is published by the Matt Holt imprint of BenBella Books.
Read the review on The Whiskey Wash
The History of the Barrel
My book starts with a history of the barrel, which I hope is far more entertaining than it sounds, going back to the Ancient Egyptians and the Romans, but also covering Prohibition, using barrels as weapons of war, transporting dead bodies in barrels, and the story of the woman who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel, and lived to tell the tale. Here’s a snippet:
In 1901 there was perhaps the utmost test of the strength of a barrel. On October 24th Annie Edson Taylor, a former schoolteacher, celebrated her 63rd birthday by becoming the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive. The only injury she suffered was a slight cut on her head, though she was seasick and admitted to losing consciousness while going over the falls.
Mrs. Taylor had had some misfortune in her life, but was nothing if not adventurous. Born in 1838 and one of eight children, she gained an honors degree while training to be a teacher. It was during this time that Annie Edson met her husband-to-be, David Taylor. They married and had a child, but the child died in infancy and sadly her husband also died soon afterwards, after suffering a wound in the Civil War.
In order to support herself she moved around the USA seeking work, and opened a dance studio in Bay City, Michigan, then taught music, and ultimately went to San Antonio in Texas and even to Mexico City in pursuit of work. Eventually, though, she had to return to Bay City where she had the idea of making herself famous and earning some money by going over the falls in a barrel. She later said that the idea came to her ‘in a flash of light’. Five years earlier, in 1896, James Hardy had become the first person to walk across the falls on a tightrope.
Photo (c) Mike Gerrard
This is one of those books where you think, “I’ll just dip in,” and hours later you emerge stocked with new knowledge and, above all, entertained. It is simply packed with fascinating facts – so much knowledge lightly worn.
Joanna Simon, Wine Writer
The Story of the Story of the Barrel
So what prompted me to write Cask Strength and the story of the barrel? It began several years ago when I was lucky enough to visit the Brown-Forman Cooperage in Louisville, Kentucky, a visit which I wrote about for the Perceptive Travel website. The dramatic scenes in the cooperage, especially the toasting and charring of the barrels, got me fascinated by barrels: their history, how they were made, and what they were used for, like barrel-aging.
Photo (c) Mike Gerrard
My new interest coincided with a great increase in experimentation with barrel-aging, especially by distillers but also wine-makers, breweries, and cider-makers. I followed their experiments with great interest, and read everything I could about barrels. Somewhere along the way, I decided I wanted to write a book about barrels.
Photo (c) Mike Gerrard
It’s widely known that all “brown” spirits are aged in barrels, but even seasoned drinkers don’t give that essential wood much thought beyond a few simple talking points. In Cask Strength, Mike Gerrard takes us down the rabbit hole of barrel-making and barrel-using, straight back to biblical times and far beyond its use in the whiskey world. His book effectively achieves the impossible: Making you care more about the barrel than what’s actually inside of it.
Christopher Null, Editor-in-Chief, Drinkhacker
The Stories of Barrel-Aging
For Cask Strength, I interviewed dozens of people who seemed to me to be doing the most interesting things with their barrel-aging experiments. These included Master Brewer Dougal Gunn Sharp of Innis & Gunn, Britain’s pioneers in barrel-aging beers, Cameron McKenzie, Head Distiller of Four Pillars Gin in Australia (whose Bloody Shiraz Gin is one of the best spirits I’ve ever tasted), and Master Distiller Harlen Wheatley of Buffalo Trace in Kentucky, who is really pushing the boundaries of barrel-aging bourbon.
Barrel-Aging Cider
Cask Strength has a chapter each for the different spirits that are aged in barrels, and also one on wine, and another on beer and cider. Here’s a short extract from one of my favorite interviews with Portland cider-maker Nat West of Reverend Nat’s Hard Cider (and yes, he really is a reverend – that story’s in the book too).
Reverend Nat’s Hard Cider, has produced a weird and wonderful range of barrel-aged ciders over the years, ever since West first equated apples with cider back in 2004. A friend of his had an apple tree in his back yard, and it produced so many apples that even after they’d made apple pies, apple sauce, dried apples, and apple butter, there was still a pile of apples left over. West suddenly thought ‘why not make cider’, having never made cider or even had the thought before.
West is also a hands-on practical guy – as cider makers, brewers, distillers, and wine-makers usually are – and within half a day he’d made a working juice press from a twenty-ton house jack and some old timber he had in his garage.
‘I clearly remember the taste of the juice of that first apple,’ West has written. ‘Sweet, rich, a bit tart, a bit nutty; I was hooked. That year I made five gallons of hard cider. The next year, fifteen gallons. The following, forty. Six years later I had five hundred gallons of supremely dry hooch in my basement and I was becoming an increasingly better cider maker. (Not to mention an increasingly popular neighbor. Friends were stopping by at all hours for a pint on the porch or a mason jar fill-up to take home.)’
West became a self-confessed cider geek and experimented with beer yeasts, wild fermentations, Belgian ale spices, aromatic west coast hops, local fruit juices… and barrels.
Photo (c) Mike Gerrard
With Cask Strength, Mike Gerrard has provided a rare beauty: a scholarly book that reads like a dream, constantly revealing unexpected joys about the unlikeliest of topics. Barrels are not only the secret ingredient to many of your favorite drinks, they also possess a sprawling history that captures the ins and outs of human invention and civilization.
Reid Mitenbuler, author of Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America’s Whiskey
Other Barrel Stories
Cask Strength isn’t just about alcohol, though. There are sections on hot sauces and balsamic vinegars, both of which are aged in barrels. There’s a chapter on growing the trees that you turn into barrels, including how the French manage their oak forests. There’s another on coopering, of course, and another on the trade of buying and selling barrels. You’ll also discover what the Angels’ Share means and how it works. Finally I ask the question: despite its thousands of years in existence, does the barrel still have a future or will modern technology step in?
Photo (c) Mike Gerrard
So that’s a potted summary of my book Cask Strength: The Story of the Barrel, the Secret Ingredient in Your Drink!
There’s lots here on the debt owed by drinkers to the wooden cask for making their favourite tipple so tasty, but Gerrard doesn’t stop at that. He transforms us into globe-hopping time travellers to show the barrel’s reach into many different corners of human society. His book drips with juicy details delivered in snappy, engaging prose. What a feat to take the humdrum wooden barrel and use it as a key to unlock all sorts of knowledge about the wider world.
Anthony Gladman, Drinks Writer
Buy your copy now from your preferred retailer.
Book Depository (with international shipping)
Indigo (for orders in Canada)
IndieBound (to support local bookstores)
There’s also an Audiobook version available through Amazon, and to download an extract click here.
Buy your copy now from your preferred retailer.
Book Depository (with international shipping)
Indigo (for orders in Canada)
IndieBound (to support local bookstores)
There’s also an Audiobook version available through Amazon, and to download an extract click here.
Wine Country International Review
Any connoisseur of whiskey and bourbon already understands the importance of the barrel. According to Mike Gerrard, an award-winning travel and drinks writer, 60-70% or more of the taste of a spirit comes from the barrel. In his new book Cask Strength, The Story of the Barrel, The Secret Ingredient in Your Drink, Gerrard explores the 5000-year relationship between the barrel and the drink. The simple wooden barrel has remained mostly unchanged since it was first used by the Ancient Egyptians. But it has remained critical to generations of distillers, brewers, and even hot sauce producers.
The book begins with the history of the barrel and moves on, spanning the world and delving into the barrel’s place of prominence in the production of whisky, bourbon, beer, wine, rum, gin, vodka, and hot sauce. Despite the barrel’s 5000-year history of putting its mark on all types of spirits, Gerrard looks to the future and how science and technology are reshaping the barrel, how it is made, and how it is used. Throughout the book, Gerrard weaves in fascinating stories and surprise tidbits that will make you the trivia expert at your next cocktail party. Why must oak trees be 60 years old before they can be harvested for barrel making? How did Sir Francis Drake shape Britain’s love affair with sherry? How did U.S. regulations for bourbon producers change the centuries-long tradition of how Scottish distillers age their whiskies? For answers to these questions and many more, I guess you will have to read the book.
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