Team leader cooperage

My name is Hasan and I was born in 1962 in Antalya on the beautiful Turkish Riviera. In 2002 I moved to Germany.

In Turkey I worked for several years as a wooden boat builder and after moving to Germany I started building wooden barrels.

I have been working for the Wilhelm Eder company in Bad Dürkheim since October 2013.

I work in the cooperage, where my main tasks are building new barrels, repairing used barrels and placing them in wine cellars.

The part I enjoy most is the building of new barrels

Barrels with Plexiglas bottoms are a particular challenge, such as a barrel into which you can now look from the front. That was a lot of fun.

Overtime my work has changed from the initial repairs of used barrels to now also building our own barrels, which are being used even beyond Europe. The expansion of our team to now 11 colleagues made it necessary to appoint a team leader. This creates more overview and structure. I particularly enjoy working with my young colleagues – especially because they all want to learn a lot.

I get along well with all my colleagues and only together as a team we can produce good quality.

I’m Daniel Kraft, I’m 26 years old and I live in Rödersheim – not far from the Eder company. I started my apprenticeship as a cooper at the age of 15 and successfully completed it at 18.

In my spare time, I’m currently building my own house and am really looking forward to becoming a dad for the first time next year.

I have been working in the cooperage at Eder since 2019. But after almost 4 years I became the cooperage team leader. The daily tasks naturally include the production of wooden barrels and vats. Assembly and being on the road are also part of it. I mainly take care of the fulfillment of a long, large order.

The most beautiful thing to see is how a complete barrel is created from a raw piece of wood. Here, the work begins with preparing and joining the raw wood. But the most fun for me is the sanding, planing and beating the barrel hoops.

I enjoy working with everyone in our team. Of course, you get along almost blindly with one colleague and don’t need two words to know what is needed now. With others, however, it takes a word or two more to get everything right.

A highlight of my work is building large barrels. Above all, seeing a few hoops hold together such a large cask used to fascinate me and still does. The entire job is demanding, because it’s more than just physical work. Brains are also required here. But I don’t mind that, because I live for the cooperage trade.

When I started working at the company Eder, it was a normal job. But then I got my official training license and so after almost 4 years at the Eder company, I became the team leader of the cooperage.