A big, red, barn-style building sits on an isolated corner of Trent Avenue. The moment you step over the threshold, the smell of fresh cedar hits your nose and you're greeted by the steady buzz of machinery reverberating off the concrete floors.
No, this isn't a lumberyard, it's Cask Drum Craft.
Micah Doering, the founder of Cask Drum Craft, moved into this eclectic building four years ago after five years of working out of his Post Falls garage. He practically resides within these walls during the week, living and breathing the art of drum making.
After learning how to play drums in the sixth grade in Rathdrum, Idaho, and falling in love with the instrument, Doering took it to the next level by building drums himself.
"In around the ninth grade, I started doing a lot of woodworking with my dad," he says. "We experimented with a bunch of different kinds of wood and built our first drum — it was a stave drum, like wine-barrel-style."
The father-son duo glued all 20 pieces of wood together, by hand, to create a new snare drum for Doering's personal drum set.
While Cask Drum Craft drums are still very much a labor of love — with each drum being tailored to each customer's needs — the production process looks much different these days.
It begins with sourcing the wood for each drum — and Doering doesn't play around when it comes to quality.
"A lot of our wood comes from back East because of the nature of the maple here," he says. "It's way too soft, and it impacts the tone of the final drum significantly. When you hit your snare drum you want a nice high-pitched sound, and that's what a harder wood will give you."
What really sets Cask drums apart from your run-of-the-mill drum is the steam-bending process, a technique that's fading as our world becomes fast-paced and based around consumer goods.
Steam-bending wood takes significantly more time than gluing together pieces of plywood, but it improves the overall performance and sound of the drum. Instead of gluing multiple pieces of wood together, Doering is bending one continuous piece of solid wood into a circle and then gluing the ends together. This reduces the amount of glue used in the process and increases the overall resonance of the drum.
"We use about 5 percent of the total glue that plywood drums contain," he says. "Sure, it might take two-and-a-half months for me to make one drum shell. I could make 10 plywood drums in one day if that was my thing, but we take the extra time and use solid wood. That ensures that our customers receive a drum with the best sound quality possible."
Currently, Doering's customer base consists primarily of original equipment manufacturers (OEM), meaning he makes drum shells for big-shot drum companies. Doering has produced fully custom drum sets for local musicians and drum enthusiasts, but that's rare. Most of his custom drum sets are shipped to drummers touring with notable musicians, like Tracy Broussard who plays drums for Blake Shelton, or drummers from other countries who have upwards of $5,000 to spare for a fully custom drum set.
It doesn't matter if Doering is creating a single drum shell for an OEM customer or an entire drum set for a rockstar, the quality of Cask Drum Craft drums never wavers and neither does Doering's passion for the craft.
"I quit my full-time job to start Cask," he says. "So far, it's been fun and extremely rewarding."
