In our cooperaage about half of the work we do is producing new barrels and half is refurbishing used barrels – when it comes to new barrels the quality of the oak and workmanship should be readily apparent, but the used barrels world is far more opaque. In this article we are going to look at how you can try and establish the authenticity of used barrels that you are buying and some of the pitfalls that you should look out for.
The first thing to say is that unfortunately the used barrel market is full of lots of shady characters: what can often happen is that dealers in barrels source their used barrels from an unconfirmed source and then sell them on characterising them in a dishonest way. So for example they may buy cheap used whisky barrels then give them a quick rinse of port wine and call them used port wine barrels (which can multiply their value of course). This kind of fradulent behavious is actually very difficult to detect, because if you smell inside a barrel and it smells of port, it is not easy to detect that it has not had port ageing in the barrel, but only been rinsed (the only way to do this would be to remove a stave and shave it down to see how deep the port staining has reached). Of course if you are sold barrels that have only been rinsed rather than authentic barrels, then you will only find out when your spirit has finished ageing in them, when none of the complexities you were looking for will be apparent.
Part of the problem here is that it is perfectly legitimate for barrels to be used multiple times: for example a barrel might first be used for wine, then port wine (port wine producers do not use virgin barrels, because they want to avoid tanins and associated flavours), then the barrel might be used for finishing a whisky (to add some sweeter flavour tones) and then the barrel refilled with whisky again. All of this is quite legimiate (and desirable) as long as each user in the chain knows what they are buying. Given that it is rather easy to pass off a cheap barrel as a more expensive one however, they buyer really has to place their trust in the used barrel supplier.
There are really only two things you can do to avoid being scammed with used barrels – the first is to buy from reputable cooperages. That is to say cooperages that have been around for a while and have a reputation to uphold and have long term relationships with barrel suppliers and clients. Furthermore a cooperage will be able to refurbish your barrels and pressure test them to make sure that there are no broken staves and/or leaks, so that you know 100% of the barrels you buy will be ready to fill. Also a reputable cooper will make sure that the barrels are stored correctly so that they are not allowed to dry out, which can lead to a whole different set of problems. A cooperage should allow you to look around their production processes and see the storarge of the barrels, which should make it is quite obvious whether it is a serious operation or not. If you ask a dodgy agent to show you their stock, they will probably make excuses or show you a non-descript warehouse with barrels stored there that are difficult to identify.
The second thing that you can do to avoid being scammed is to look at the price that you are paying – typically the scammer barrel agents will charge considerably less than proper cooperages, because of course they will have bought their barrels for next to nothing. Used barrels (other than those at the end of their life) are rather valuable, because lots of people want them and there is typically more demand than supply. In the case of buying used barrels, if the price is too good to be true, it is because they are fakes!
We encourage all of our clients to visit our cooperage and see how we refurbish and store are used barrels (and how we make new ones), all using traditional techniques that have been largely unchanged for generations.
