A Stout Offer: Mountain Lumber Rescues Historic

Ruckersville, VA – The quality, tradition and history that have made Guinness® a favorite with beer drinkers will soon be available in flooring created from planks salvaged from its oak brewery vats.

Mountain Lumber has acquired a limited supply of wood planks originally used in Guinness Brewing vats at the company’s brewery in Dublin, Ireland. Mountain Lumber has arranged to import 25,000 board feet of English Brown Oak which will be milled into European Cooper’s Oak Flooring™.

An earlier offering of Cooper’s Oak Flooring in 2003 proved extremely popular, with the entire stock being claimed in pre-sale ordering. Mountain Lumber will begin taking pre-sale orders for this most recent batch of European Cooper’s Oak sometime in March, 2007.

The flooring is the ultimate souvenir for Guinness aficionados and history buffs. It is beautifully preserved and exceptionally durable.

“The first time we offered the Guinness material much of it sold sight unseen. People were so eager to have a piece of the Guinness history in their own home, they just sent a check and asked us to send some.” said John Williams, Vice President and head of sales for the company.

According to Guinness history, coopers from Dublin’s Cooper Society were hired to build vats, or casks, for the brewery. Each vat was capable of holding about 722,600 pints of stout. Brown Oak was chosen for the vats because it had the strength and grain to handle the stress of the brewery trade. Coopers strengthened knots in the wood by tapping tiny hand-carved wedges into them.

In the 1940s, Guinness converted the brewery to a sterile plant and wooden vats were replaced with
easier-to-maintain metal vats. Some of the wooden vats were dismantled and stored while others were marked for demolition.