.jpg)
When you sit across the table from Joe Smith, you gather rather quickly that he is a man who doesn’t need much. I’ve heard these kinds of individuals described as “salt of the earth,” and in this case that rings true: he is Michigan born-and-bred, a native of the Lower Peninsula, which apparently qualifies him as a “troll” since he lives below the Mackinac bridge. He’s married, has two young children, and lives a couple doors down from the house that he grew up in, which sits on the same property that is now home to his workshop, out of which he runs Croze Nest. I am sitting next to Smith, and we’re discussing his decision to leave a promising career as a marketing manager at a software company to produce whiskey barrels. Coopering, as its called, is not a very common profession. To give you an idea, the Associated Cooperage Industries of America (ACIA) lists 49 members on its website that are active in the domestic cooperage industry. Comparatively, recent research has the number of operating American craft distilleries nearing 3,000. Coopering barrels is a complex combination of engineering, math, and hard labor.
Making a barrel that will successfully hold liquid for many years, through many seasons, with nothing more than metal hoops and geometry is no easy task, and it’s not a skill you’re likely to pick up in a college elective. Smith knew he enjoyed working with wood, and he knew that it was something that truly made him happy. “Really when I was 18, even in college, it was a stress reliever,” Smith says of the pastime. “Leave the campus, go out to dad’s woodshop for a couple hours on a Thursday, and the stress was gone.” He confided his feelings of discontent in his corporate workplace to a friend, and that person sent him a link to a piece from the Wall Street Journal detailing a shortage in whiskey barrels. At that moment, like the seed of a great oak tree, the idea began to take root. Smith decided to make a barrel, but to do so he would need wood. He contacted a relative who worked for a company that made custom oak trims. “I called them up and said, ‘Hey I need quarter sawn white oak, and I need a bunk of it.’ I didn’t have any idea about seasoned wood, I didn’t know about how it’s dried. I didn’t know about the science behind it, I just knew I needed white oak.” While problems surrounding the right wood and treatment for the taste and character of American whiskey would later arise, the more immediate issue was that Smith did not actually know how to put the thing together. Instead of fretting too hard over the dilemma, he decided to do a bit of basic math. “If I’ve got 30 staves in a barrel, 360 degrees divided by 30 is 12, two angles on each stave, it’s six degrees,” Smith decided. Simple enough, or so he thought. “My first barrel was straight-walled. And then I was like, well, crap, I screwed this up because it needs to have a taper.”At a loss for instruction, Smith turned to the existing community to get a bit of assistance. He started by taking tours of different cooperages but soon found they were insufficient in telling him what he needed to know. “They were public tours一they showed how a barrel was built, but I needed the intricacies of it,” Smith elaborates. Finally, he caught a break: a cooper allowed him to come in and watch while they constructed an entire barrel.
After four hours, Smith had learned the basics of the process. He now knew how to go about engineering a barrel. The business did not fall into place right away. Though he had the rough elements in his head, there was still the matter of applying it to actual wood. To make matters even more challenging, Smith had taken a new job in his corporate industry. “Sixty days into this new job I get asked to come into the office and I get fired. They told me I was not a good enough fit,” says Smith. He was blindsided and quickly began a somewhat frantic search for a different position. During this time, his wife reminded him that other options remained on the table. “Through all this, my wife is going, ‘You can only apply for so many jobs a day, keep working on [the barrel business].’ So I keep working on it.” At this point in his journey, however, Smith had met a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. The quotes that he had received for necessary equipment were not promising; most put him in need of capital close to a million dollars to move forward. Instead of giving up, Smith turned to his father-in-law, an engineer who owned his own die shop, to try and figure out a way to fabricate his own equipment and keep costs down. “In all of this I’m still slowly working, I’ve got the whole business plan done,” notes Smith. “I’ve got the finances done, started the conversations with my father-in-law about what equipment [we could just] build, and I get this job.” A new job had landed in his lap, better than the last one. Bet you can’t guess what happens next. After two failed starts at new jobs, Smith was finally convinced that some kind of divine intervention was at work. He spoke with his wife, who was supportive but realistic, and together they set a deadline: if he hadn’t sold a barrel in the next year, he would pack up his dreams of charring wood over an open fire and get back to his corporate career. Smith decided to attend that year’s cooper’s conference in San Diego, California.
Up until that point, he had had trouble finding a supplier, but at the tail end of 2016 the oak shortage began to taper and wood was in more abundant supply again. At the conference, he learned about the way that oak must be aged for whiskey barrels, recalling the reaction that some oak sellers had when he told them that he was buying from a lumber yard. “They were like, ‘Don’t sell that, that’s a bad barrel. That’s got harsh tannins in it, it’s going to taste crappy.’”Once Smith’s materials were stocked, he returned to the primary task at hand. He had a pallet of wood from which he thought 20 barrels could be made and decided that he would try to make one successful barrel out of that lot. Quite a low bar to set for himself, but Smith figured if he could make one good barrel, the rest would come. He enlisted the help of his father-in-law, who built him a couple of jigs, and invested in some old woodworking equipment, and together they built a set of staves. “I’ve got a barrel, that on measurement一at the time I was working on 30-gallon barrels一is a 30-gallon barrel. Cool, I know I can build a shell of a 30-gallon barrel. How in the hell do I croze this thing?”In the meantime, Smith had developed a relationship with another local cooperage, Kalamazoo Cooperage, who had built their own crozing machine.
They offered to let him come down and croze his barrel at their cooperage, which he did to less than satisfactory results. “The first barrel looked like a bubble,” Smith tells me. “It was massive. I had my angles wrong.” Ben Aldrich from Kalamazoo offered him some advice: Smith was taking too much off both his head and his bilge, which resulted in perfectly curved barrel staves that were supposed to be straight. Smith redesigned his barrel and got back to work, but found that his materials were dwindling. “At this point, I had figured I had about $20,000 into oak and nothing to show for it. I’m starting to freak out.” In a panic, he cut up the remainder of his wood into staves and began to put it together. It fit. Smith took his barrel to Kalamazoo and found that it crozed nicely. He had assembled his first complete barrel, and it wouldn’t stop leaking.Smith took his barrel back to his father-in-law’s shop looking for answers. They measured it together and found that the head of the barrel was a 32nd of an inch off in diameter, and could not seal right with the croze, which is the groove inside the barrel.
They adjusted their design, built two new heads, and finally had a receptacle ready for spirit. From his initial pallet, Smith found he still had enough wood to build two more barrels, which landed him with three complete barrels out of a possible 20. “So once I had proven I could build a barrel, I started going to distilleries in Michigan and talking to them, and I got my first order for 12 barrels in April of 2017.”It’s now 18 months later, and Croze Nest is still very much a fresh face in the market, but they are working hard. Smith initially wanted to keep things small and still does一he is the only person to touch every barrel that comes out of the cooperage. It’s just one of the things that sets him apart from other folks in the industry, though he has nothing but kind things to say about them. Croze Nest is committed to doing things the old way. “I use an open fire to bend it, I use all oak chips, introduce very little water in the process till the pressure testing and hydration happens,” says Smith about his production. “I work with craft distillers and some buy all their barrels from me, and some just buy their specialty stuff.” “In all of this my grandmother was doing a genealogy project, and she found out that my 10th great-grandfather was the master cooper on the Mayflower,” Smith reveals. “So ten generations later, the Smith family picked up the hammer and started again, and I’m building it the same way he did it in 1620.” Perhaps coopering was simply meant to be.