Yet the tornado bourbon got the distillers wondering: What are the perfect conditions for storing the barrels in which bourbon ages? It’s a question that no one had really asked before, despite the oft-noticed phenomenon that barrels situated near the windows in warehouses have a tendency to become what managers call “honey barrels”—that is, ones that produce above-average whiskey. Moreover, the storage question was a logical follow-up to one that Buffalo Trace had already been pondering: How do you make a perfect barrel?

Both questions are critical for any maker of bourbon. It’s well known that a good portion of a whiskey’s flavor comes from the barrel it ages in, but less well known is just how large a portion we’re talking about. I recently asked a dozen or so people involved in the bourbon industry how much of the flavor comes from the barrel, and how much comes from other elements, such as the grains used or the distillation method. Most said that 60 or 70 percent of the flavor comes from the barrel, and one went as high as 80 percent. No one I spoke with estimated the proportion at less than 50 percent—meaning one of the trendiest liquors on the contemporary cocktail scene owes most of its flavor to a technology that’s thousands of years old.

Liquor barrels are essentially Dickensian nano-factories—dark, sooty, mysterious places from which marvelous things emerge. But they came to that role only after long service as simple containers for shipping and storage.

“The barrel, like the wheel, is one of the outstanding basic inventions of mankind,” wrote the historian William B. Sprague in a 1938 essay. Wooden-stave barrels first appeared millennia ago. In the first century A.D., Pliny the Elder noted their widespread use in the foothills of the Alps.

Used for centuries to transport everything from whale oil to pickles to nails, the barrel is far more ingenious than it appears at first glance. It bows out slightly in the middle (called the bilge), so each individual stave forms a longitudinal arch linking a barrel’s top and bottom. Each stave also abuts two adjoining staves, so they form, collectively, another arch, this one latitudinal around the circumference of the barrel. Barrels are thus remarkably stout and durable: if one tumbled off a ship’s gangway onto a wharf during loading, the impact of the fall was shared by all the staves, reducing the risk of breakage.

Barrel design also evolved such that a single stevedore could move one weighing hundreds of pounds. When standing upright, a barrel can be tilted and rolled on its edge; on its side, it’s even more maneuverable—only a tiny portion of the barrel touches the ground, so it can be spun in any direction, and a light push will start it moving. A skilled worker can bring it upright by rocking it a few times and popping it into position.