The cooper: the trade behind the Kieffer name

A cooper makes containers from wooden staves: narrow, curved boards set side by side and held tight by hoops. Done well, the result holds liquid without glue or nails. Barrels, vats, tubs and buckets were the packaging of the pre-industrial world. They stored and carried wine, beer and countless other goods, so towns everywhere needed coopers.

In the dialects of Alsace, Lorraine and Luxembourg, that craftsman was the Kieffer. The article on the origin of the name explains how the word became a surname.

An ancient craft

Wooden casks are old technology. Coopers were already working in Gaul in the first century BC, and in the Roman Empire wine travelled mostly in wooden barrels rather than clay jars. Until industrialisation, coopers worked closely with brewers and wine merchants, and in many towns they shared a single guild with them.

One trade, many names

German had no single word for the cooper. Each region used its own, and many became surnames:

French says tonnelier and English says cooper. Both are surnames too, which is why a Kieffer, a Böttcher, a Tonnelier and a Cooper can claim the same trade in their family name.

Guilds and celebrations

Coopers were proud of their craft. Some of their guild customs survive as festivals. In Munich, the coopers’ dance (Schäfflertanz) is still performed. The coopers of Ulm and Bolzano had their own dance, the Bindertanz.

Wine country

The Kieffer heartland is wine and beer country. Alsace and the Moselle valley have grown vines for centuries, and every harvest needed casks.

Strasbourg has a remarkable reminder of this. Beneath the city’s hospital, the vaulted cellar of the Hospices civils dates from 1395. There, an Alsatian white wine from the 1472 vintage has been kept in an oak cask for more than five centuries. In 2003, the regional press reported that a bottle of dry wine is added every quarter to make up for evaporation of about one per cent a year.

Every bottle of Alsatian wine began its life in a barrel, and every barrel in a cooper’s workshop.

Decline and revival

From the end of the nineteenth century, the craft declined sharply. Factories made barrels by machine, and metal buckets and tubs replaced wooden ones. After the Second World War, plastic, aluminium and stainless steel took over most of the work that wooden casks had done for beer and wine.

Since the 1990s, winemakers focused on quality have returned to wooden casks, and the craft has seen something of a revival. Today’s coopers combine traditional skills with modern machines. Some also make wooden bathtubs and plunge pools.