The growth in craft brewing, liquor distilling and wine making has led to a shortage of a key component used in all three industries — wooden barrels.

“Demand is increasing, and getting barrels is tough,” said Brad Irwin of Oregon Spirit Distillers in Bend.

Last year, Irwin purchased 48 barrels from Kentucky-based Kelvin Cooperage. But he will not be able to get that many this year — at least from that cooper, or barrel maker.

All Kelvin Cooperage barrels have been allocated to customers for the year, said William Hornaday, the company’s director of production and quality control.

“We are turning down business every day, which is unfortunate,” Hornaday said, adding that the company sells and resells about 400,000 used and new barrels a year.

The booming booze industry has also led to a shortage of white American oak — the only wood allowed for aging bourbon.

And there’s no sign of improvement.

“We knew demand was very high and that there were going to be shortfalls of barrels, but we never thought it was going to get to this point,” Hornaday said.

Making fully closed barrels for storing food and liquid began around 800-900 B.C., according to “Oak Aging and Wine,” from the U.S. Forest Service. Coopering takes great skill and precision, requiring a five- to seven-year apprenticeship, according to Guinness, the Irish beer maker that employed about 300 coopers in the 1920s.

At Kelvin Cooperage, it takes about eight hours to make a barrel from start to finish, Hornaday said.

“The people who are in (the industry) stay in it,” he said, “and not many new people get in. If you walk into a cooperage like ours, it’s really like you’re walking back into time.

“When you are making a barrel, no matter how technologically savvy the world becomes, someone is still going to have to pick up a hammer and beat the barrel.”

Oregon has a few wooden barrel makers, but the type of wood and how it’s prepared — charred or toasted — affects the flavor of the liquid stored inside.

Oregon Spirit Distillers can’t use just any barrel, Irwin said. Bourbon must be aged for three years in new charred American oak barrels. The distillery on Northeast Butler Market Road filled 12 barrels with whiskey Wednesday. But Irwin won’t see the return on that investment for three years.

“That’s just what it takes to make whiskey,” he said. “You have to wait that long.”

The wait also means Irwin must manage his warehouse inventory three years in advance, so a barrel shortage could impact the future of his business.

“Bourbon is the biggest selling, and it’s more than 25 percent of our whole line,” Irwin said.

He currently has spirits aging in 300 barrels, and for each barrel, he gets about 300 bottles. When he is done with his whiskey barrels, he said, he sells most of them to local breweries and uses a small number to age his rum.

In addition to whiskey, he also produces other spirits including vodka, absinthe, rum and a variation of gin called Genever.

Hornaday said the shortage will impact distillers, as well as wine makers and brewers.

“It’s scary for a bunch of small guys that are just getting ramped up and have a lot of money invested into this,” he said. “They’re finding they can’t get any barrels to put their spirits into.”

Barrel-aged beer

Contributing to the shortage: the increasing popularity of barrel-aged beer.

Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association, estimated barrel-aged beer sales grew between 25 and 30 percent in 2013.

“Barrels will often give notes of vanilla and tannin,” he wrote in an email. “In the case of barrels used previously for red wine, bourbon or other wine, spirit or beer, sometimes what was in the barrel before can contribute (to) some of the flavor of the beer to again add complexity and give a brewer a space to be creative and innovative.”

Kelvin Cooperage sold about 1,000 barrels to beer makers about five years ago, Hornaday said. This year, he expects to sell more than 20,000 barrels to breweries, including Deschutes Brewery in Bend.

Gary Fish, founder of Deschutes, said consumers have driven the demand for barrel-aged beer. Deschutes has about 2,000 barrels in its barrel room on Southeast Ninth Street, and the program is continuing to grow. Some are chilled in a 10,000-square-foot space to barrel-age beer, while others are stored in a heated room where the brewery ferments its sour-style beers.

While most beer tastes better served fresh, he said, brewers continue to experiment. And some brews, such as Deschutes’ Mirror Mirror, an oak-aged barley wine, have a different evolutionary path.

“You’ll get the amber tinge to it … a sense of a dried prune-like flavor that you get off a glass of sherry, port, even an older glass of red wine, and we think those are really interesting flavors, fun and atypical to the way we were all taught about beer,” he said.

Deschutes has been barrel-aging beer for 10 to 15 years. But even new, small breweries are following the trend.

“I would be surprised if anybody was starting a new brewery and didn’t involve some kind of barrel-aging as part of their business plan,” he said.

Paul Bergeman, the brewer at the soon-to-open Wild Ride Brewing in Redmond, said some of Wild Ride’s first brews will be put it into barrels that previously held Jack Daniel’s whiskey.

He expects it will take three to six months of aging to get his desired flavor profile, and he hopes to get two runs through the barrels.

Some of the first barrels ever made probably stored wine, according to the Forest Service document. But at least wine makers can reuse the barrels, until they start leaking or develop defects, said Doug Maragas co-founder of Maragas Winery, north of Terrebonne.

“There’s different degrees of extraction,” he said. “When (a barrel is) brand new, you get the most extractions of that wood flavor … and with each use it decreases until you get to neutrality.”

Maragas said he has wine aging in about 100 barrels. The barrels are made out of oak trees from eight different states and cost between $500 and $1,500 a barrel. He said he gets a maximum of 10 seasons out of a barrel, and when it can no longer be used for wine, he either uses it for decoration or sells it for $75.

Maragas believes the large harvest of wine grapes last year has contributed to the shortage of barrels. The market constantly fluctuates, he said, so he’s not worried about a barrel shortage impacting his business.

“It’s the ebb and flow of agriculture that dictates it,” he said.

—Reporter: 541-617-7818,

rrees@bendbulletin.com