Wooden casks were used by Guinness for almost 200 years. The last wooden cask was filled at the brewery in 1963. If you thought cask-making was a gentle craft, think again. The Guinness cooperage was a commercial timber yard, smithy, carpentry shop and metal foundry all rolled into one. If being a Guinness cooper was hard, becoming one was even harder. An apprenticeship could take up to seven years. To make sure that he never forgot the day he became a fully qualified cooper, the apprentice endured a centuries-old initiation ceremony. First, he made a cask by hand and then fired it. With the cask still smoking, he was placed inside it and Guinness stout, water, wood shavings and anything else was thrown in with him. The new cooper was then rolled around the cooperage or down the street, in his own cask. When his fellow coopers decided that he suffered enough, he was released from his cask.

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