At the end of last week some test barrels for our Glenfiddich project arrived.
We’ve been making some small and slightly dodgy sculptures out of spare polyboard, but this was our chance to collapse some real barrels and get to grips with how they’re actually made.
First of all you have to knock the ‘hoops’ off.
Then the top can come off. (By the way, the slats/staves are numbered so we can remember what order it all goes back together).
Here we’ve put it on its side so we can get the bottom hoops off.
Eventually it, er, falls apart. Look, no glue. It’s just held together by the hoops and the way the staves are cut to fit together.
The insides of the tops often tell you where the casks originate from. In this case from the Jack Daniels distillery in Tennessee. It surprises most people (it definitely surprised us) to find out that whisky manufacturers like Glenfiddich prefer their barrels second-hand (less ‘oaky’, or something like that). So they buy them from bourbon manufacturers after they’ve used them once (which can be for as little as three years).
Here are the slats, laid out.
And on their sides.
And then shot from the side.
We couldn’t stop ourselves trying out a few ideas about how we might use the staves together. Not sure what it is yet, but it looks great.
And there must be something we could do with these barrel hoops.
Next week: some first ideas, (we hope).
This is the fifth in a series tracking the progress of a live project for Glenfiddich where we've been asked to design some barrel art for the whisky manufacturer, and we’re tracking the project on Thought for the week. The first piece was here, the second piece was here, the third piece was here, the fourth was here.