Episode 19
Nicola Twilley of Gastropod Teaches Us About Refrigeration!
Beer is best served cold but it wasn't that way for most of human history! Nicola Twilley joins Gary, Bobby, and Allison to talk about the history of refrigeration and how brewers changed the world (of refrigeration).
GRAB THE BOOK
Grab your copy of "Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves" here! -> https://respect-the-beer.captivate.fm/frostbite
NICOLA TWILLEY BIO
Nicole Twilley is the author of "Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves" and co-host of Gastropod, a podcast looking at food through the lens of history and science.
Nicky was raised in England and currently based out of Los Angeles, where she is making use of the abundant sunshine to pretend she has a green thumb. She also frequently contributes to The New Yorker.
PATREON
Join for free to get social and get exclusive content: patreon.com/respectingthebeerpod
FACEBOOK GROUP
Got a question about beer or just want to get social? Join the RtB Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/respectingthebeer
Got a question? Email us at respectingthebeer@gmail.com
--
EPISODE TIMELINE
00:00 Introducing Nicola Twilley
00:45 The History of Cold and Refrigeration
03:25 Early Innovations in Creating Cold, Ice Harvesting
05:52 The Role of Thermodynamics in Refrigeration
10:30 The Natural Ice Industry and Its Challenges
13:14 Refrigeration's Impact on Brewing
17:12 The Evolution of Beer Storage and Transportation
29:23 Conclusion, Come Back for Part 2
--
CREDITS
Hosts:
Music by Sarah Lynn Huss
Recorded & Produced by David Kalsow
Brought to you by McFleshman's Brewing Co
Transcript
Hello everyone.
Gary Arndt:And welcome to another episode of the Respecting the Beer podcast.
Gary Arndt:My name is Gary Arndt and with me as usual is Bobby Fleshman and Allison McCoy.
Gary Arndt:And we have a very special guest today.
Gary Arndt:Now, every time you've probably gone to have a beer, it's often called a cold one and cold refrigerated beer is kind of the norm, but it wasn't always the case.
Gary Arndt:There was a time when beer was almost always room temperature.
Gary Arndt:Our guest today is Nicola Twilley.
Gary Arndt:She's the author of "Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves."
Gary Arndt:And she's also the co host of the very popular Gastropod podcast.
Gary Arndt:Nicola, welcome to the show.
Nicola Twilley:Thank you for having me.
Gary Arndt:So why don't we start out, let's just go back to the origins.
Gary Arndt:If you lived in a cold climate, cause I, I've done episodes on this as well in my show, it was kind of easy to make things warm.
Gary Arndt:You just burn something, but making something cold in a climate that's not cold was much more challenging.
Gary Arndt:So why don't you give us like the, the 50, 000 foot view of this problem throughout history.
Nicola Twilley:Yeah, for most of human history, even before modern humans really evolved, we've known how to make things warm.
Nicola Twilley:We've had control of fire.
Nicola Twilley:People argue that's even what made us human.
Nicola Twilley:That's what enabled us to sort of get the big brains that, that define being a modern human.
Nicola Twilley:So that piece was easy, like you say, but for most of human history, making cold was not an option.
Nicola Twilley:And natural cold, as you point out, is sort of fleeting, ephemeral, dependent on where you live, the time of year, the seasonality.
Nicola Twilley:In parts of the world, you might get no natural snow or ice, but you have, say, a cave where it's a little bit cooler and a steady temperature year round, but, but really, that was your only option.
Nicola Twilley:And people didn't understand even what cold was.
Nicola Twilley:It was just genuinely puzzling to some of the finest minds, like, you know, Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Boyle, Francis Bacon Galileo, all of them kind of wrestled with this idea of " what the hell is cold?"
Nicola Twilley:Some people thought it was, a type of material like a frigorific atom was the was the expression people used.
Nicola Twilley:Some people thought it was a property that was sort of generated in the north and traveled maybe by air, maybe underground.
Nicola Twilley:No one knew.
Nicola Twilley:So it was really, I mean, Robert Boyle at one point in his writings complains about it.
Nicola Twilley:There is no topic in natural history that has given him as much frustration as this.
Nicola Twilley:He can't make head or tail.
Nicola Twilley:Francis Bacon actually died investigating cold.
Nicola Twilley:He was stuffing ice into a chicken when he caught a chill Okay, so people also blame the fact that he then went to bed to, get over his cold and the, the sheets were damp, which kind of helped, but he died from a chill brought on from investigating cold.
Nicola Twilley:Descartes sort of decided that basically we were, we'd have an easier time proving the existence of God than the existence of cold.
Nicola Twilley:So it really is a tricky topic for most of human history.
Gary Arndt:So what were the steps that were taken for people to start to get control over this or the ability to create cold?
Nicola Twilley:Long before we could create it, people were getting a handle on at least how to make natural cold a little more portable and useful and bring it to where you wanted and store it for a little bit.
Nicola Twilley:As far back as, you know, Prehistory in the Middle East, you have people bringing ice down from the mountains, storing it in purpose built ice houses.
Nicola Twilley:You have a big leap forward in Renaissance Italy, where John Battista Della Porta, who's famous for all kinds of things also figures out that if you add salt to ice, you can lower its melting point enough to then chill, say, custard to make an ice cream and you get this huge kind of cold boom they call it a new ice age in renaissance Italy where people are starting to be like, Oh, we can make, we can make ice.
Nicola Twilley:We could freeze custards.
Nicola Twilley:We can make wine slushies for summer.
Nicola Twilley:This is great.
Nicola Twilley:The first person to make ice without natural cold was actually a Scottish doctor in Glasgow.
Nicola Twilley:A pupil of his, had noticed that if you put a thermometer in wine and then took it out, it would get cooler almost immediately.
Nicola Twilley:It's the wine evaporating off that does that because cold, as we now know, is sort of this sense of loss as heat moves away.
Nicola Twilley:When you have something that evaporates that fast, you produce cooling.
Nicola Twilley:William Cullen, this Scottish doctor was like, that's intriguing.
Nicola Twilley:Wonder if I could use that somehow develops a system.
Nicola Twilley:Using ether actually was his evaporant of choice and a vacuum.
Nicola Twilley:So he's building on the works of his predecessors to, to get that evaporation in a vacuum that produces you know, enough cold, basically pulls out enough heat to freeze the water.
Nicola Twilley:And it's just a party trick.
Nicola Twilley:No one knows what to do about it.
Nicola Twilley:He writes up a paper, no one reads it at the end of the paper.
Nicola Twilley:He just sort of says, well, this seems like worthy of investigation.
Nicola Twilley:But a hundred years go by before anyone does consider it worthy of investigation, because it's just not clear that it's a, it's something that we can scale up and why we would want to do it, honestly,
Gary Arndt:And spoiler alert, the evaporation technique is basically what's still driving a lot of this today.
Nicola Twilley:Oh, totally.
Nicola Twilley:William Cullen was on it.
Nicola Twilley:He just had no idea what he was on.
Gary Arndt:Alison, you look like you're sitting in the front row of the class and are just dying to raise your hand.
Gary Arndt:Bobby & Allison: I love it so much.
Gary Arndt:Oh my God.
Gary Arndt:So I listened to your podcast, Gastropod, when you talked about the book and you, you shared the story.
Gary Arndt:And I, in saying that, you know, I don't think anyone's ever read this book, but I paper and I was like, I'm a chemist, a PhD.
Gary Arndt:I should read this.
Gary Arndt:I teach thermodynamics.
Gary Arndt:I can do it.
Gary Arndt:I tried to find it and I can't find every single paywall and it was published in like 1758.
Gary Arndt:So a new personal challenge is I'm going to read this paper.
Nicola Twilley:Oh, I can send it to you.
Nicola Twilley:Bobby & Allison: Because there's so many things in the history of thermodynamics where it's just a footnote, like the, the idea of entropy.
Nicola Twilley:So Ludwig Boltzmann's major contribution to thermo and understanding like, why throughout all of human history, cold has been really hard to do based off the thermodynamics.
Nicola Twilley:We're going deep, everyone, just hold on.
Nicola Twilley:It's going to be great.
Nicola Twilley:Just, heat goes from hot to cold.
Nicola Twilley:Cold can't stay cold.
Nicola Twilley:It's gonna become hot.
Nicola Twilley:And that is it's pretty hard.
Nicola Twilley:Basically from an idea called entropy and Boltzmann wrote this in a footnote.
Nicola Twilley:And he's like, Oh yeah, by the way, S equals K log W.
Nicola Twilley:And that's like now on his tombstone.
Nicola Twilley:It's such an important, like the reason that it's so hard and human history really, it has truly changed based off this invent invention of refrigeration because hot goes from hot to cold, cold can't stay cold.
Nicola Twilley:So in that, in the idea of thinking of all the different things that have Truly changed the world when I heard that you'd written this book about refrigeration.
Nicola Twilley:I was like, Oh my God, we wouldn't, we wouldn't be brewers if we didn't have an ability to make things cold because of entropy.
Nicola Twilley:That's amazing.
Nicola Twilley:Anyway, that's all I'm going to say.
Nicola Twilley:You know what?
Nicola Twilley:I'll , speak for myself.
Nicola Twilley:I'm not a scientist and I didn't study science in school.
Nicola Twilley:And I myself was also a bit like, so what is cold?
Nicola Twilley:I mean, I think most people, they know their fridge is cold.
Nicola Twilley:They know they love their beer cold, but do they have any idea that like, cold is not a thing.
Nicola Twilley:Your fridge is not making cold.
Nicola Twilley:Your fridge is just a box where heat is being transferred out of it.
Nicola Twilley:Repeatedly.
Nicola Twilley:Bobby & Allison: I teach my students when we're, when we're working on, I teach it in the introductory chemistry courses and my advanced thermodynamics courses where I say, okay, heat is the thing.
Nicola Twilley:Like we care, cold is just lack of heat.
Nicola Twilley:And so we do everything with respect to heat.
Nicola Twilley:We actually never talk about cold.
Nicola Twilley:Cold just means you don't have heat and heat hasn't gotten there yet because he wants to and it will find a way unless you're smart like Cullen was, Oh, I'm going to read his paper.
Nicola Twilley:Yeah.
Nicola Twilley:Okay.
Nicola Twilley:Yeah, but it is funny also because, you know, it was a curiosity, like here was this thing that people didn't understand.
Nicola Twilley:It was confusing in a lot of ways.
Nicola Twilley:And yet once we had a way of controlling it, there wasn't an idea for how that could be useful to us other than as kind of a party trick.
Nicola Twilley:So there's some, you know, early kind of attempts of like, Oh, we can, we can cool a chamber for the king and it's like a, you know, a Westminster Abbey or whatever.
Nicola Twilley:And it's just like, it's just a party trick.
Nicola Twilley:People could make a little ice for a slushie or a, like, again, these sort of decadent treats rather than the essentials of life.
Nicola Twilley:It really wasn't seen as something that like had a mass application at all.
Nicola Twilley:And that always blows my mind.
Nicola Twilley:Cause this is really recently it's 1755 when William Cullen writes this.
Nicola Twilley:So yeah.
Nicola Twilley:This and is the first person to make cold you know, artificially.
Nicola Twilley:Bobby & Allison: Well, and yeah, Robert Boyle was like, what, in late 1600s and then in France, you had the thermodynamicists really pushing away ballooning.
Nicola Twilley:That was the big thing.
Nicola Twilley:So in the middle of the 1700s, the French had figured out that if you heat up air and can create these balloons, then you can like, you know, ride in balloons.
Nicola Twilley:And they just made gazillion dollars like with balloon rides.
Nicola Twilley:But they were so focused on the heat part.
Nicola Twilley:They kind of forgot about what they were doing with the remaining bits was the cold part.
Nicola Twilley:You know, once you move the heat from one place to another.
Nicola Twilley:But I think because we'd never had it at scale and never been able to control it at scale, there wasn't a good imagination of what we could do with it if we could.
Nicola Twilley:You know, like we had already seen that heat was useful in so many ways because we'd been able to , have control of that and use it, bend it to our will for so long.
Nicola Twilley:So we knew it had all these uses cold, you know, people, yes, they knew it preserved food.
Nicola Twilley:They didn't know why they knew it, you know, was refreshing in the summer, but there wasn't sort of a sense of what a world in which we could make cold on demand could look like,
Nicola Twilley:Bobby & Allison: And then the brewers came in!
Nicola Twilley:Pretty much.
Gary Arndt:Oh, why don't you talk about that then?
Gary Arndt:I'm guessing this is late 18th, early 19th century cold in the form of ice harvesting becomes kind of an industry, right?
Gary Arndt:And a pretty big industry.
Nicola Twilley:Yeah, this is the funny thing, it took natural ice becoming a big industry for people to understand, Oh, if we could make ice, that would also be useful.
Nicola Twilley:And so the natural ice industry, again, people had been harvesting it for millennia and storing it in these rudimentary kind of ice caves and using it to chill their drinks in summer.
Nicola Twilley:If they were wealthy.
Nicola Twilley:It takes a high school dropout.
Nicola Twilley:Called Frederick Tudor from Boston.
Nicola Twilley:He goes on vacation with his sickly elder brother to Cuba.
Nicola Twilley:Because they're from New England, bless their hearts.
Nicola Twilley:They're like, Oh, my God, it's so hot.
Nicola Twilley:We can't handle the heat.
Nicola Twilley:And Frederick has this brainwave.
Nicola Twilley:He sort of says, well, I would kill for an ice drink right now because his family, like a lot of wealthy new England families had an ice house for their own personal consumption, like for ice drinks in the summer.
Nicola Twilley:Then he thinks, whoa.
Nicola Twilley:I bet if you could get Cubans ice, they would go crazy for ice water in the summer, iced wine or ice beverages.
Nicola Twilley:I'm going to do this and make a fortune.
Nicola Twilley:And everyone, literally everyone is just like, wow, Frederick, you have lost your mind.
Nicola Twilley:How are you going to get ice to Cuba?
Nicola Twilley:How are you?
Nicola Twilley:And like, what, what are you talking about?
Nicola Twilley:And Frederick is like just, you know.
Nicola Twilley:No interest in the doubters.
Nicola Twilley:He's like, I'm shortly going to have more money than I even know what to do with.
Nicola Twilley:He's full of confidence and it's of course a disaster at first.
Nicola Twilley:He ships the ice to Cuba.
Nicola Twilley:No one knows what to do with it.
Nicola Twilley:No one wants it.
Nicola Twilley:It melts on the way home.
Nicola Twilley:No one has anywhere to sell it.
Nicola Twilley:He hasn't thought anything through, it's an extremely relatable story.
Nicola Twilley:Basically everything you could think through, he hasn't done.
Nicola Twilley:Even down to the fact of like at the time of year where you can harvest the ice, Boston Harbor is iced over, so you can't take it anywhere.
Nicola Twilley:So you have to build ice houses, but he hasn't built those.
Nicola Twilley:So what should an ice house look like?
Nicola Twilley:The whole thing is just a catastrophe on several levels.
Nicola Twilley:He goes broke three times, goes to jail twice, and that somehow he persists.
Nicola Twilley:And it works.
Nicola Twilley:He starts to, he develops a business model.
Nicola Twilley:He develops the technology is a whole long story.
Nicola Twilley:And there's actually a great book on this topic called "The Frozen Ice Trade" by Gavin Waitman, which is a really fun read.
Nicola Twilley:And that obviously you should also read it in my book, but uh, he figures it out and he turns it into a global business.
Nicola Twilley:He's shipping ice to Australia and to Calcutta and to South Africa.
Nicola Twilley:Being able to have ice at this scale, it starts to become useful.
Nicola Twilley:And one of the early, early, early adopters are brewers in North America.
Gary Arndt:Why, what was so special about brewers?
Gary Arndt:Because they had been, you know brewing ales and whatnot for centuries.
Gary Arndt:What was so special about this ability to cool and chill?
Gary Arndt:that brewers were able to take advantage of.
Nicola Twilley:Well, so this is where I feel like a brewer should answer the question.
Nicola Twilley:But my understanding is just that what happens is in the 1850s, in the mid 1800s, say there's a huge wave of German immigration to the U.
Nicola Twilley:S.
Nicola Twilley:And those folks would rather drink lager than ale.
Nicola Twilley:Now, ale, for that, it's top fermented and it can be fermented at higher temperatures.
Nicola Twilley:Lager, , it prefers lower temperatures.
Nicola Twilley:Am I right?
Nicola Twilley:Bobby & Allison: Right.
Nicola Twilley:So I'll jump in there.
Nicola Twilley:That's good.
Nicola Twilley:A good segue.
Nicola Twilley:So first of all, anything gets driven by market, right?
Nicola Twilley:The fact that brewers are even involved in this story means that somebody was spending money on what they were making and they were able to become the engineers and the technicians that drove it, I imagine.
Nicola Twilley:Yeah.
Nicola Twilley:But yeah there's a couple of important stages, important, important stages in.
Nicola Twilley:I'm going to stop you just right now.
Nicola Twilley:It's just part of the podcast as I stop him and I could turn it into more entertaining banter.
Nicola Twilley:No.
Nicola Twilley:So when we do a beer tour bring people into the back of the room and we really divide up the brewing process into hot side and cold side.
Nicola Twilley:And so the hot part is where, you know, you extract the sugars and all that.
Nicola Twilley:And the cold side is actually where the beer is truly made in controlling those temperatures.
Nicola Twilley:Now you can speak.
Nicola Twilley:The, the, the really generic joke we always tell is the true microbrewers are the yeast.
Nicola Twilley:The yeasties.
Nicola Twilley:It's something people never laugh at.
Nicola Twilley:But that all happens on the cold side, right?
Nicola Twilley:So, but, but on the cold side where fermentation begins, where the sugars are being converted into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Nicola Twilley:That requires a certain temperature in order to get the same product or the product you're interested in.
Nicola Twilley:Ales and lagers both can actually ferment at a wide range of temperature, but the result won't be as, as desirable unless the lagers are fermented at colder, say 40 to 50 degrees.
Nicola Twilley:Fun side story.
Nicola Twilley:Yeah, so we did a experiment when we were in a homebrew club to where all the brewers they brewed all the same batch and then everyone had a different homework assignment to put the different beers into different temperatures for the fermentation Oh yeah, and it was so great, and so then it all started with the same initial batch and then assuming that you followed your, your instructions and we had some lagering freezers and so we were able to actually lager some of the things and others didn't have it and some people kept it really hot and then we tasted the, the end result.
Nicola Twilley:Oh, the variation!
Nicola Twilley:Wow!
Nicola Twilley:It was so bad, like everything was so different.
Nicola Twilley:And temperature, everyone was like, Whoa, okay.
Nicola Twilley:So this is how I need to really invest in the, like the lagering refrigerator.
Nicola Twilley:And so that's the fermentations, the first piece, but like Allison's saying, there's this longer period, which is what loggers use it several different ways.
Nicola Twilley:And one of those ways is the storage time at cold temperatures.
Nicola Twilley:And there's something that happens, whether you buy into it entirely or not, there's something magical about.
Nicola Twilley:Having a beer sick cold for 12 weeks and come out the other side a little more refined, and we're getting a better sense on the quantitative side of what's going on, but it still holds, and brewers are very traditional as much as they are experimental But not only that, it's not even magical.
Nicola Twilley:I mean, Chemistry slows down when it's cold.
Nicola Twilley:You don't have as much thermal energy in the environment.
Nicola Twilley:There's not as much thermal heat.
Nicola Twilley:And you get rid of the heat, the chemicals, you know, the molecules themselves are like, well, I'm kind of tired.
Nicola Twilley:I'm going to move a little slower.
Nicola Twilley:That's called kinetic molecular theory, also known as everybody.
Nicola Twilley:And humans are the same way.
Nicola Twilley:We also slow down when it's cold.
Nicola Twilley:That's how refrigeration works.
Nicola Twilley:It just slows things down.
Nicola Twilley:Bobby & Allison: I think it's worth, you know, it's popping in my head, the better way to tell this story.
Nicola Twilley:I think the Germans, they, they started with, I won't be able to lay out all the players in this story, but they, they created what was called the Reinheitsgebot.
Nicola Twilley:And before that, there's another document that drove how beer had to be made in Bavaria.
Nicola Twilley:And the year was 15 purity laws,
Nicola Twilley:Bobby & Allison: 500 years, almost to the year that we opened.
Nicola Twilley:We tried to be open in 2016.
Nicola Twilley:We made it a little bit later, but we wanted to be 500 years to the day.
Nicola Twilley:No one was paying attention.
Nicola Twilley:No one cares except us.
Nicola Twilley:We understand that.
Nicola Twilley:But in any case they were, they were coming out of a period where beer was not so awesome.
Nicola Twilley:And they were trying to make lighter beers.
Nicola Twilley:They were based on the pale ales that were coming from the United Kingdom.
Nicola Twilley:And Pilsner was born and Hellas and so forth.
Nicola Twilley:And, and they were trying to make better beer than any in the, and even in the Czech Republic was.
Nicola Twilley:And in order to get there, they needed to they needed to.
Nicola Twilley:Stay to hold back the bacteria that would cause it to go sour.
Nicola Twilley:And inadvertently they realized that keeping beer cold, brewing in the cold months, they were able to avoid that and it would be a better product to sell through the summer.
Nicola Twilley:That also where the beer garden originated.
Nicola Twilley:And then the beer garden is the way I'm told it came about was they would put gardens over the cellars where they kept these beers at these cooler temperatures.
Nicola Twilley:Chestnut trees, I think, grew really well over these, like, cavities of cellars and that just an inadvertent side effect is tables were thrown under these, under these trees.
Nicola Twilley:And that became what we connect with as a beer garden.
Nicola Twilley:And of course, then the trees are taking the thermal energy from the sun.
Nicola Twilley:More of that energy transition.
Nicola Twilley:You know, it's, well, it's like that.
Nicola Twilley:Is it in Iceland that they have all those houses that have the gardens on top and such as a temperature control?
Nicola Twilley:That's amazing.
Nicola Twilley:I did not know that about the beer garden.
Nicola Twilley:Bobby & Allison: Yeah, I, I don't know when I heard that, but that's, that's where it was born.
Nicola Twilley:And, and then you fast forward to 1840 and I guess you get the Germans moving to the United States and, and they are trying to replicate what they were doing in their, their homeland.
Nicola Twilley:And I think there was a confluence of technologies that led to the need for refrigeration to replicate that.
Nicola Twilley:He knows I'm about to ask a question, but the, our friend from Cuba from the
Nicola Twilley:Frederick Tudor?
Nicola Twilley:Bobby & Allison: Yeah, him.
Nicola Twilley:So did he.
Nicola Twilley:Did he do the invention of making ice?
Nicola Twilley:He just transported, he was more of like a distributor then.
Nicola Twilley:Yeah, he, he is the person who really made natural ice, the natural ice business into a business and available at scale.
Nicola Twilley:And that was initially what those lager brewers in the U.
Nicola Twilley:S.
Nicola Twilley:were reliant on.
Nicola Twilley:They had caves, obviously they either dug caves or used caves, you know, as, as in Europe, but it gets just really very hot.
Nicola Twilley:Especially in Midwestern parts of the country, they were setting up in St.
Nicola Twilley:Louis and they were setting up in Chicago.
Nicola Twilley:And they were finding it really hard to keep those temperatures reliably cool.
Nicola Twilley:And so they were the biggest users of natural ice, like just period that like the, the brewing industry was just all in on natural ice and they bought up huge amounts of ice.
Nicola Twilley:They had their own ice houses.
Nicola Twilley:They would deliberately buy up lakes and ponds that they could control to make sure they had enough ice.
Nicola Twilley:And then what really happened is there was just a series of, of what they called ice famines at the time, these really hot summers.
Nicola Twilley:1854 was apparently so hot and okay, it's so hot.
Nicola Twilley:What do you want?
Nicola Twilley:You want a cold, nice, cold lager.
Nicola Twilley:That'd be nice, but.
Nicola Twilley:The brewers, the brewers haven't been able to make any because there isn't any ice and they, they, I mean, there's all these laments in, you can find in contemporary newspaper coverage and so on.
Nicola Twilley:The brewers are just like, this, this is killing us.
Nicola Twilley:We don't have enough ice.
Nicola Twilley:And so that kind of unreliability plus, you know, the meat trade was starting to use a lot of ice.
Nicola Twilley:So there was competition.
Nicola Twilley:You said earlier, everything is driven by market.
Nicola Twilley:Well, once there was increasing demand for ice, you know, it's a limited resource.
Nicola Twilley:So prices are going up.
Nicola Twilley:And then the other thing that's happening is increasingly Americans are moving into cities and they're just more and more of those Americans and they are not treating their wastewater at all.
Nicola Twilley:And so you start to get a situation where the ice isn't really very nice either.
Nicola Twilley:In the 1850s, that's not such a problem.
Nicola Twilley:It really picks up toward the end of the century.
Nicola Twilley:But these brewers, they're in St.
Nicola Twilley:Louis are just like, wow, the ice is getting really pretty grody.
Nicola Twilley:We, we don't want to be using this.
Nicola Twilley:We talked about sort of this kind of breakthrough where William Cullen figured out how to make ice, but didn't know what to do with it.
Nicola Twilley:He's figured out how to make ice.
Nicola Twilley:By the time Fred Tudor shows there's a big market for this, it's actually a global market and it's a hungry market and the brewers want it and the meat packers want it.
Nicola Twilley:By the time you get those two things together, suddenly people are paying attention and then they go back to this idea of like, okay, if you could evaporate ether or something like that in a vacuum, could we do this?
Nicola Twilley:And you get, you start getting people tinkering with machines and you get the first working.
Nicola Twilley:mechanical refrigeration.
Nicola Twilley:, and then bless their hearts again, you think, of course, they couldn't imagine it.
Nicola Twilley:They used a refrigeration machine to make ice.
Nicola Twilley:They didn't use it to cool a room or to cool beer or to cool anything.
Nicola Twilley:They use it to make ice because in their head, ice was the thing that made cold.
Nicola Twilley:So they used it, the first you know machine to make ice artificially was sold actually to two breweries one in London and one in Australia in the 1850s.
Nicola Twilley:So that's when it happens.
Gary Arndt:Bobby, I have a, I have a question about lagers and kind of like the supply chain.
Gary Arndt:You're mentioning that it has to be brewed when it's cold, has to be stored when it's cold.
Gary Arndt:Does it have to always be cold during its entire life?
Gary Arndt:In other words, could you brew it cold?
Gary Arndt:Then put it in something room temperature, ship it somewhere else, and cool it down with that.
Gary Arndt:Does that ruin it, or does it have to be
Gary Arndt:Bobby & Allison: Only if you want me to come slap you somewhere.
Nicola Twilley:I was gonna say, my understanding is for sure no.
Nicola Twilley:It has to be kept cold.
Nicola Twilley:Bobby & Allison: The other side to the refrigeration story is the pasteurization and the pasteurization.
Nicola Twilley:And you can actually preserve product, you can preserve foods these days.
Nicola Twilley:We understand the damage quote done during pasteurization and we limit that in order to control the bacterial or the aging effects of these.
Nicola Twilley:So we can have things then after they've been pasteurized, they can actually be more or less stable on the shelf.
Nicola Twilley:The problem is that, as Allison will tell you, that Every 10 degrees Celsius, the chemical reactions will occur.
Nicola Twilley:The natural chemistry, the degradation, the decrease, the increase of entropy, etc.
Nicola Twilley:It's almost like one of those, like, it's like, imagine an elevator, you know, you like, you could take the stairs, but it would take forever.
Nicola Twilley:But there's an elevator.
Nicola Twilley:And if the elevator happens to take you to that floor, the chemical, like you're going to get off on that floor, the chemical reaction is going to happen.
Nicola Twilley:If it has a thermal energy, if it's on that elevator and it happens to stop at that floor, that chemical reaction is going to occur.
Nicola Twilley:And a lot of chemical reactions are driven by the heat energy.
Nicola Twilley:So you give it that extra boost and it's like, Oh, I can go this way instead of that way, but slowing down close to freezing, we're, we're looking at more or less stabilizing that and we've had several beers that I, I mean, we, we're in the beer business, I guess.
Nicola Twilley:And so we might leave.
Nicola Twilley:Leave a six pack in the back of the truck.
Nicola Twilley:And I was like, Oh crap, it's still out there and I'll drink it.
Nicola Twilley:And I know it doesn't taste the same.
Nicola Twilley:These beers are like my children.
Nicola Twilley:I know it's like, okay.
Nicola Twilley:We do not pasteurize and there's a philosophical and a technical conversation there.
Nicola Twilley:I can taste a difference between one that's been hot and one that's been cold all its life.
Nicola Twilley:But it's very subtle.
Nicola Twilley:Very subtle.
Nicola Twilley:Just to say what those early brewers were doing, Busch actually, Adolphus Busch he was the first to pasteurize beer, but he was also the first to use a refrigerated rail car.
Nicola Twilley:And now.
Nicola Twilley:The rail car wasn't using a machine.
Nicola Twilley:It was using natural ice, but he was fully invested in both actually just to again, try and control that quality.
Nicola Twilley:And prior to that, often, you know, the beer would be sold, you know, within a couple of miles of where it was made.
Nicola Twilley:You had this intensely local beer scene.
Nicola Twilley:You know, the invention of the iced refrigerated rail car.
Nicola Twilley:It's often credited to the meat industry and it was a big effort in the meat industry.
Nicola Twilley:Gustavus Swift was sort of a pioneer.
Nicola Twilley:There's some debate and I don't think any certainty over who actually put the first working refrigerated rail car on the road because there were a lot of failures before it worked.
Nicola Twilley:But certainly Busch was right there at the same time that Swift got this going, right there with his own design for a ice cooled refrigerated rail car so that he could ship his beer.
Nicola Twilley:Bobby & Allison: And I think it is worth padding the large brewers on the back then and now they, they do, It, if it's not exciting, that's one conversation, but it's, but it's the same every time.
Nicola Twilley:And the amount of money to invest in that infrastructure, like that, that initial, like there's, there's a reason that I'm, I'm guessing that Miller and Budweiser were also big players in, in the refrigeration.
Nicola Twilley:Not just Bush and who else is.
Nicola Twilley:Well, Budweiser is, Anheuser Busch.
Nicola Twilley:Yeah.
Nicola Twilley:Oh, I guess that's true.
Nicola Twilley:Yeah.
Nicola Twilley:Anheuser.
Nicola Twilley:But yeah, like they're, right.
Nicola Twilley:As much as they, they might not necessarily reflect the craft beer scene, which is more local and we're kind of getting away from these, you know, really large industrialized and I should now give you the other side of it.
Nicola Twilley:You can't have the best double IPA in the world unless it's kept cold from beginning to end.
Nicola Twilley:There's no way you can pasteurize that and allow those aromas to survive, the way that chemistry plays out.
Nicola Twilley:I think we can, we can agree that refrigeration has been a boon to, to beer.
Nicola Twilley:I mean, I grew up in England and you know, you can have a warm pint of bitter and um, it, I live in the U S and I prefer, I would rather have an IPA any day of the week.
Nicola Twilley:So yeah.
Nicola Twilley:Bobby & Allison: I was going to bring up the story of, of Mild and Porter and so on and how those beers had their shelf life and how they had to be blended from the, the publican who worked behind the bar because they would go sour and you could create multiple beers from three different hand pools.
Nicola Twilley:And that's, that's the story of how beer was not, not pasteurized and not kept cold.
Nicola Twilley:And you had to be creative.
Nicola Twilley:So, no kidding.
Nicola Twilley:So you'd go into the pub and you'd say, oh, I'd like a pint a mild.
Nicola Twilley:It wasn't, you weren't asking for a pint of, you know, Truman's or whatever, because it would be a blend.
Nicola Twilley:Bobby & Allison: Exactly.
Nicola Twilley:Mild would have been one that hadn't soured yet.
Nicola Twilley:And, and these days we associate with alcohol level, but that's not really what's happening.
Nicola Twilley:And then you could get a porter, which would be a house combination of a brown ale and a mild and so on.
Nicola Twilley:And there would be ways to, to, to strike that, that flavor profile that they, that they cater to.
Nicola Twilley:This is so interesting because one of the things I argue in the book is that a lot of the flavors that we're used to food wise are actually like pre refrigeration food preservation techniques, the kind of salty, smoky, sour, funky flavors that people love and that we have sort of evolved to, to really enjoy as flavor bombs are actually just us trying to fight the microbes that want to, you know, get to our food before we can.
Nicola Twilley:But it turns out the same with beer, huh?
Nicola Twilley:These styles that I thought were just styles turn out to be an attempt to make something drinkable out of something that's going off.
Nicola Twilley:Bobby & Allison: Yeah.
Nicola Twilley:I mean, on its face, I talk a lot about how styles come about because of local water supply, but then when we get into these more complex issues of storage and stability, you're definitely going to get into the preferences that come about for those reasons.
Nicola Twilley:I had no idea.
Nicola Twilley:That's amazing.
Nicola Twilley:I should have spoken to you before I wrote this
Nicola Twilley:Bobby & Allison: Part two.
Nicola Twilley:There you go.
Gary Arndt:That concludes the first part of our discussion with Nicola Twilley.
Gary Arndt:Stay tuned for the next episode when we get into how refrigeration turned the United States into a beer drinking country.
Gary Arndt:Remember to join our Facebook group and support us over on Patreon.
Gary Arndt:Links to both of which are in the show notes.
Gary Arndt:Until then, please remember to respect the beer.
