I was lucky enough to be a cooper
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Petr Kotrbatý was born on 21 October 1950 in Pilsen. His mother Marie Kotrbatá had three children with three partners, but she did not live with any of them for a long time, her father helped her with the children. His grandfather Jan Kotrbatý was a worker in a brewery, he earned extra money by repairing shoes. He had met wooden barrels long before he became a cooper - his grandfather used to get the discarded ones from the brewery and heat them, while as a child, the witness used to cut their staves (i.e. the individual parts that make up a barrel) in half to fit into the stove. In 1966, he entered the vocational school of the West Bohemian Breweries, its building was on the Gambrinus premises. He trained as a cooper. The apprentices went to two sections of the brewery for their apprenticeship, the “mechanical barrel making room”, where the smaller transport barrels were repaired, or the “big team”, which took care of the large lager barrels. After school, he then joined the “big team”, which at that time took care of about eight thousand large lager barrels - they were washed, repaired, and had to be re-resined (first the old pitch was removed and then they were sprayed with new pitch). In 1974 he got married and to get a flat faster, he joined the Communist Party, then left it again right after the revolution. The couple had two daughters, Petra and Pavlína, and Petr Kotrbatý used to earn extra money - for example, he unloaded ice from wagons, which was transported to the brewery’s fridge from Bolevecký Pond. When Gambrinus replaced the wooden lager barrels with stainless steel tanks in 1993, he lost his job as a cooper and worked in other brewery operations. He took early retirement in 2010, but then returned to the barrel making as a temporary worker for nine years. He goes bowling with his colleagues from the brewery, then they sit down and “recall their youth and their craft”.
