Whether it's cars, houses or meal portions, things that are physically huge in America are typically more sensibly-sized in Europe. But when we showed you the process of making Jack Daniels' booze barrels, those items were average-sized; Pilsner Urquell's beer barrels, on the other hand, are gi-normous constructions with a 3,000-liter capacity, large enough to easily crush a man.
As for how the barrels are built, "the craft itself is not written in books," explains Vlastimil Strunc, of Pilsner Urquell's Heritage Department. "You can't go to school and just train to be a cooper, so our coopers need to pass their knowledge from generation to generation, and basically train the new carpenters."
In the following video you can watch them being made by a team of just eight expert coopers. The barrels are so huge that the skinniest guy amongst them is tasked with climbing inside to hammer the lid shut from the inside, and he must then wriggle out through an aperture that they later seal off.
Twice a year the barrels need to be "re-pitched," that is, they must have their insides recoated with the resin pitch that keeps them watertight. You'd think they'd rig the barrels up in a huge gyroscope, like what they use with a rotation-molding machine, to spread the pitch; but given that they're sticking with the same building methods they used in 1842, they do this the hard way:
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