36-498: Robert Cain may refer to: Robert Cain (brewer) (1826–1907), founder of Cains Brewery in Liverpool, England Robert Henry Cain (1909–1974), Victoria Cross recipient Bob Cain (1924–1997), Major League Baseball pitcher Bob Cain (footballer) (1866–?), Scottish footballer Bob Cain (reporter) (1934–2014), American news anchor Bobby Cain (1931–2012) American racing driver
72-545: A cooper and tubs made of staves in use at the grape harvest. Palm-wood casks were reported in use in ancient Babylon . In Europe, buckets and casks dating to 200 BC have been found preserved in the mud of lake villages. A lake village near Glastonbury dating to the late Iron Age has yielded one complete tub and a number of wooden staves. The Roman historian Pliny the Elder reports that cooperage in Europe originated with
108-487: A cooper on board, to assemble shooks (disassembled barrels) and maintain casks. In the 19th century, coopers who crafted barrels on ships were often called groggers (or jolly jack tars ), as when a barrel of rum had been emptied, they would fill it up with boiling water and roll it around, creating a drink which was called grog. Coopers in Britain started to organise as early as 1298. The Worshipful Company of Coopers
144-414: A cooperage. Traditionally, a cooper is someone who makes wooden, staved vessels, held together with wooden or metal hoops and possessing flat ends or heads. Examples of a cooper's work include casks , barrels , buckets , tubs, butter churns , vats, hogsheads , firkins , tierces , rundlets , puncheons , pipes, tuns , butts , troughs , pins and breakers. A hooper was the man who fitted
180-504: A half inches thick and featured grooves where the heads fitted. They had Roman numerals scratched on the surface of each stave to help with reassembly. In Anglo-Saxon Britain, wooden barrels were used to store ale, butter, honey, and mead . Drinking vessels were also made from small staves of oak , yew or pine . These items required considerable craftsmanship to hold liquids and might be bound with finely worked precious metals. They were highly valued items and were sometimes buried with
216-605: A pseudonym used by writer William H. Keith Jr. See also [ edit ] Robert Cane (1807–1858), Irish editor Robert Kane (disambiguation) [REDACTED] Topics referred to by the same term This disambiguation page lists articles about people with the same name. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Robert_Cain&oldid=1212498072 " Category : Human name disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description
252-409: Is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Robert Cain (brewer) Robert Cain (1826–1907) stands as a notable figure in the brewing industry, particularly renowned for his role in establishing Robert Cain and Sons , a prominent brewery located in Liverpool, England. He was born on Spike Island, County Cork , Ireland on 29 April 1826,
288-554: Is listed as Mary Kirk (died 1864). The story of the life of Robert Cain and Cains Brewery is told in Christopher Routledge's 2008 history of the brewery, Cains: The Story of Liverpool in a Pint , which unpicks many of the mythologies that have developed around the Cain family. Many of these mythologies seem to date back to the 1920s and 1930s, when Cain's sons William Cain and Charles Nall-Cain were given titles in
324-596: Is one of the oldest Livery Companies in London. It still survives today although it is now largely a charitable organisation. In the 16th century, the company won the right for coopers to be independent from breweries. Many coopers worked for breweries, making the large wooden vats in which beer was brewed, such as Guinness in Ireland. They also made the wooden kegs in which the beer was shipped to liquor retailers. Beer kegs had to be particularly strong in order to contain
360-598: Is over 250 years old. In the United States, there are also few master coopers left. Ramiro Herrera, Master Cooper for Caldwell Vineyard in the Napa Valley , was sent to France to learn his trade, where only two out of 40 starters completed the four-year training course. It takes him around 11 hours to build a barrel, before it is ready to be toasted. Recycling casks is common in the trade, and wine casks may be converted to contain beer. Centuries-old tools remain
396-402: Is the most common size for an ale cask. As part of the barrel-making process , the cask needs to be steamed to soften and loosen lignin in the wood, and it is then toasted. Toasting develops the flavours of the sugars in the wood, that is the cellulose and hemicellulose . Then the barrel is charred, which involves exposing it to 1,300 °F (704 °C) for 45 seconds. A wine barrel
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#1732787996295432-406: Is toasted for around 35 minutes with a low fire, while for whiskey it is usual to toast for just 45 seconds on a high fire, to burn the surface. In the 21st century, coopers mostly operate barrel-making machinery and assemble casks for the wine and spirits industry. Traditionally, the staves were heated to make them easier to bend. This is still done, but now because the slightly toasted interior of
468-646: The British honours system, and centre on the idea that the brewery's founder had a background in the Irish gentry. Such a background would have made his sons more acceptable to the British establishment at the time. However, according to Routledge, Robert Cain was born in poverty in 1826, the son of a private soldier who would soon be forced to leave the army and travel to England to find work. Cain arrived in Liverpool with his parents in late 1827 or early 1828 and grew up in
504-612: The Gauls in Alpine villages where they stored their beverages in wooden casks bound with hoops. Pliny identified three types of coopers: ordinary coopers, wine coopers and coopers who made large casks. Large casks contained more and longer staves and were correspondingly more difficult to assemble. Roman coopers tended to be independent tradesmen, passing their skills on to their sons. The Greek geographer Strabo records wooden pithoi (casks) were lined with pitch to stop leakage and preserve
540-474: The Industrial Revolution at the turn of the 19th century and prohibition in the United States in the early 20th century, there was less demand for barrels, and over time, various other containers were manufactured for shipping goods, including shipping containers , metal drums, and corrugated cardboard . Storing, shipping, and fermenting alcohol became the main uses for wooden barrels. In
576-642: The 21st century, and, while there is a need for new coopers, there has been no pathway to the trade via apprenticeships since 1996, when the Howard government reformed the apprenticeship scheme to focus particularly on construction, food and hospitality, and hairdressing . In January 2024, it was reported that there was only one winery left in Australia still making its own barrels for storing wine, and there were fewer than 100 people still making barrels at small cooperages for other purposes. Some cooperages, such as
612-764: The British establishment. William Cain became a baronet while Charles Cain, later Charles Nall-Cain , entered the House of Lords in 1933 as the first Baron Brocket , joining several other brewers in what became known somewhat disparagingly as The Beerage . Both sons were noted philanthropists. Cooper (profession) A cooper is a craftsman who produces wooden casks, barrels , vats, buckets, tubs , troughs , and other similar containers from timber staves that were usually heated or steamed to make them pliable. Journeymen coopers also traditionally made wooden implements, such as rakes and wooden-bladed shovels. In addition to wood, other materials, such as iron, were used in
648-694: The area of Toxteth Park , Liverpool where he lived that he became known as "King of the Toxteths". Contemporary reports of his funeral and burial at St. James's Cemetery suggest as many as 3,000 people attended. The company, Robert Cain and Sons, owned over 200 pubs in Liverpool but is most notable for having built three of the most gloriously extravagant pubs in Britain: The Philharmonic Dining Rooms , The Vines and The Central. These highly ornate and elaborate pubs, built to celebrate Robert Cain's own success and to demonstrate
684-428: The contents of which sustained crew and passengers on long voyages. They also made barrels to contain high-value commodities, such as wine and sugar. The proper stowage of casks on ships about to sail was an important stevedoring skill. Casks of various sizes were used to accommodate the sloping walls of the hull and make maximum use of limited space. Casks also had to be tightly packed, to ensure they did not move during
720-605: The daughter of James Newall, a shoemaker, and they were married on 4 April 1847 in St. Philip's Church, Hardman Street, Liverpool. He began brewing around 1848 on Limekiln Lane in the Scotland Road area, but soon expanded his operation to a nearby brewery on Wilton Street and finally moved to the existing Mersey Brewery (now known as the Robert Cain Brewery or Cains Brewery ) on Stanhope Street, Liverpool in 1858. At
756-644: The dead as grave goods . After the Battle of Hastings in 1066, when the Normans started settling in England, much wine was shipped over the English Channel from France. Wherever and whatever goods were traded, casks were used, in the same way as cardboard boxes later became common storage containers. Ships, in the age of sail , provided much work for coopers. They made water and provision casks,
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#1732787996295792-453: The early days, Guinness employed its own team of up to 300 highly-paid coopers in the brewery, making barrels which would be shipped around the world, and wooden casks were used by the brewery for nearly two centuries. In 1946 aluminium kegs were introduced, and over time gradually replaced the wooden barrels, until these in turn were replaced by stainless steel in the late 1980s. By 1961 there were only 70 coopers still employed by Guinness, and
828-455: The government's insistence that trainees should attend a university killed off a lot of the interest. Subsequently, there has been a resurgence of craft breweries and English winemakers employing coopers. In 2015 Simms was at Theakston Brewery in Masham , North Yorkshire . Simms had an apprentice by November 2015. He still uses the traditional tools, including a croze which he estimates
864-476: The landmark redbrick part of the brewery was constructed. By the time of his death on 19 July 1907 Cain was one of Britain's richest men, leaving a personal estate of £400,000 (around £28 million at 2005 prices). He also had political influence, working behind the scenes to help the Conservative Party maintain control of Liverpool throughout the late nineteenth century. In fact he was so influential in
900-624: The last wooden cask was used in March 1963. Barrels intended for wine storage are made predominantly with either French common oak ( Quercus robur ), French white oak ( Quercus petraea ) or American white oak ( Quercus alba ), or Quercus sessilifolia , an Asian species that grows in Japan, Taiwan, and much of south-eastern China . There are three main categories of coopering: In wet coopering, wooden casks were traditionally made in several sizes in England and Ireland, including: The firkin
936-447: The manufacturing process. The trade is the origin of the surname Cooper . The word "cooper" is derived from Middle Dutch or Middle Low German kūper 'cooper' from kūpe 'cask', in turn from Latin cupa 'tun, barrel'. The word was adopted in England as an occupational surname , Cooper . The art and skill of coopering refers to the manufacture of wooden casks, or barrels. The facility in which casks are made referred to as
972-487: The preferred tool of the master cooper. By 2021, very few of the 30-odd coopers left in the United States still used traditional methods. The number of coopers has declined in Australia. A 1959 photograph held in the National Library of Australia is captioned "The cooper Harry Mahlo (one of the last coopers) Yalumba wineries, Angaston, Barossa Valley, South Australia, 1959". Several cooperages have closed in
1008-538: The pressure of the fermenting liquid, and the rough handling they received when transported, sometime over long distances, to pubs where they were rolled into tap-rooms or were lowered into cellars. Prior to the mid-20th century, the cooper's trade flourished in the United States; a dedicated trade journal was published, the National Cooper's Journal , with advertisements from firms that supplied everything from barrel staves to purpose-built machinery. After
1044-456: The same time as he was developing his brewing business, Cain also made shrewd property deals and ran a hotel near to the brewery on Stanhope Street; as the company grew it expanded by buying out smaller brewers and taking control of their pubs. Cain became one of Liverpool's most successful businessmen with a passion for using the most modern techniques and equipment. He expanded the brewery several times, most notably in 1887 and in 1900–1902, when
1080-724: The skill of Liverpool craftsmen, remain landmark Liverpool buildings in the twenty-first century. Cain is also notable as an example of social mobility in Victorian and early twentieth-century Britain . From the early 1860s the Cains lived in the affluent enclave of Grassendale Park and later owned mansions on Aigburth Road and in Hoylake on the Wirral . In all the Cains had 11 children, including five sons and six daughters. Despite their Irish immigrant background two of his sons joined
1116-472: The slums of the Islington area of the city with his older sister Hannah and two younger siblings, Mary and William. When he was in his early teens Cain was indentured to a cooper on board a ship carrying palm oil from West Africa. After working out his indenture Cain returned to Liverpool in 1844 where he set himself up first as a cooper and soon after, as a brewer. According to Routledge he met Ann Newall,
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1152-525: The son of James Cain (1797–1871), a private soldier in the 88th Foot , a regiment of the British Army . There is some dispute over the identity of Cain's mother. Later family records and stories claim that his mother was Mary Deane, the daughter of Alexander Deane, an architect and mayor of Cork. However, in the entry for his brother William in the Liverpool register of births his mother's maiden name
1188-562: The staves imparts a certain flavour over time to the wine or spirit contents that is much admired by experts. In the 1960s, breweries started using metal casks because of cost and simplicity; since then, the trade of master cooper in England has been dwindling. In 2009 there were only four breweries left in England employing coopers, and only one was a master cooper: Alastair Simms at Wadworth Brewery in Devizes , Wiltshire ). When he appealed for apprentices, there were many applications, but
1224-445: The voyage and endanger the ship, crew and cask contents. Whaling ships in particular, featuring long voyages and large crews, needed many casks – for salted meat , other provisions and water – and to store the whale oil. Sperm whale oil was a particularly difficult substance to contain, due to its highly viscous nature, and oil coopers were perhaps the most skilled tradesmen in pre-industrial cooperage. Whaling ships usually carried
1260-418: The wine. Barrels were sometimes used for military purposes. Julius Caesar used catapults to hurl barrels of burning tar into towns under siege to start fires. Empty casks were used to line the walls of shallow wells from at least Roman times. Such casks were found in 1897 during archaeological excavation of Roman Silchester in Britain. They were made of Pyrenean silver fir and the staves were one and
1296-465: The wooden or metal hoops around the barrels or buckets that the cooper had made, essentially an assistant to the cooper. The English name Hooper is derived from that profession. Over time, coopers took on the role of the hooper themselves. An Egyptian wall-painting in the tomb of Hesy-Ra , dating to 2600 BC, shows a wooden tub made of staves, bound together with wooden hoops, and used to measure. Another Egyptian tomb painting dating to 1900 BC shows
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