Episode 20
Gastropod's Nicola Twilley Tells How Polly Pennington Changed Refrigeration
Have you ever heard of Polly Pennington? The badass pHD chemist who changed refrigeration? Nicola Twilley joins Gary, Bobby, and Allison again to talk about early brewing trends in America and M.E. Pennington's story.
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
Nicola 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.
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TIMELINE
00:00 Introduction and Welcome
00:25 The Importance of Lager in Beer Culture
03:34 Steam Beer and Refrigeration Challenges
07:45 The Evolution of Refrigeration in Brewing
11:22 Polly Pennington: The Unsung Hero of Refrigeration
18:16 What else is in the book?
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CREDITS
Hosts:
Music by Sarah Lynn Huss
Recorded & Produced by David Kalsow
Brought to you by McFleshman's Brewing Co
Transcript
Hello everyone.
Gary Ardnt:Welcome to another episode of Respecting the Beer.
Gary Ardnt:This is part two of our interview with Nicola Twilley.
Gary Ardnt:She's the author of the book "Frostbite: How refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves."
Gary Ardnt:If you haven't listened to the first half of the interview, I suggest you do that first before listening to this half.
Gary Ardnt:And with that, here is part two.
Gary Ardnt:Bobby one question I have, we've been talking about refrigeration and cooling.
Gary Ardnt:And the one thing that always comes up is lager.
Gary Ardnt:You go to a liquor store today, grocery store, look at beer.
Gary Ardnt:Almost everything is a lager.
Gary Ardnt:How important was this style of beer to the popularization of beer?
Gary Ardnt:Do you think, cause you don't see a lot of.
Gary Ardnt:I mean, you, you see more today than you used to, but lager really was, most people think of that as beer,
Bobby Fleshman:Right?
Bobby Fleshman:I was going to bring this up a minute ago and asking a question of chicken and egg.
Bobby Fleshman:Was it the brewers or the Germans in waiting that became the consumers of these beers?
Bobby Fleshman:Or was it the Germans, the brewers and the technicians that drove it to become, so we're talking about beer a lot, but in a lot of ways, the.
Bobby Fleshman:We're also saying lager, that this was not just beer, this was lager that was driving all of this.
Allison McCoy:So are you, to clarify your question, well, so are you asking is it that the, the Germans like in terms of like technology development, we're like, Oh, I, here's something, we can make this thing cold.
Allison McCoy:Oh, that's cool.
Allison McCoy:I like my beer cold.
Allison McCoy:Oh, that's cool.
Allison McCoy:Whereas let's say a British, I'm going to say a British woman, because women are the ones that should really be behind the sciences.
Allison McCoy:Often were.
Allison McCoy:Oh, I know.
Allison McCoy:I want to talk about her.
Allison McCoy:Anyway, but like in asking, well, why would I want to make my beer cold?
Allison McCoy:My beer is not cold.
Allison McCoy:So I'm not paying attention to this technology.
Bobby Fleshman:Well, I think I'm just saying that the, the, the Germans drove the expansion of beer over liquor, over cider, just because I think they had a populace that consume more beer and the beer they consume was lager.
Bobby Fleshman:I think that really laid the bedrock for the introduction of beer to most of America at the time.
Bobby Fleshman:And we've lived with that now for 170 years as being the bedrock of our beer culture.
Nicola Twilley:I think you're right.
Nicola Twilley:It's a beer drinking, it's a lager drinking culture and there was this huge influx of German Americans and it is also a very pivotal time.
Nicola Twilley:So just to point out like this is a time where American cities are expanding, like doubling in size every decade.
Nicola Twilley:And German immigrants are the ones that are going into those cities and really defining the culture.
Nicola Twilley:It was really like, you can't underestimate, it was huge waves of, of German immigrants, first German, then, Irish, then Italian, but Germans were going in and, and, kind of defining the culture in the urban, in these huge growing environments.
Nicola Twilley:So I think they did drive like that they knew what they wanted to drink.
Bobby Fleshman:Well, they, they wanted, but I think drove the introduction in the pallets of the future consumers.
Allison McCoy:Also the lagers were a lot lower.
Allison McCoy:Well, I would say they're, they're a lower ABV.
Allison McCoy:I mean, if it was the potable water source also, which has been an argument that it, you know, People made the beer because that's the water that you could safely drink, back to the food safety concern.
Bobby Fleshman:Bourbon is probably not the best potable source of water.
Allison McCoy:You know, I mean that, you know, during lunch, bourbon doesn't really help the work day.
Nicola Twilley:Different ideas about productivity.
Nicola Twilley:I have a question about steam beer, because what I have heard is that , this became a popular style in California because there wasn't this vibrant natural ice industry out there.
Nicola Twilley:And so you had to have this other way of, of cooling.
Nicola Twilley:Steam beer, California common, call it what you will.
Nicola Twilley:That's the result of actually not having access to cooling.
Nicola Twilley:Is that right?
Bobby Fleshman:Yeah, it's phase transition all over.
Bobby Fleshman:So in this case, they're sending hot wort after it's been boiled to the roof.
Bobby Fleshman:And it's in what are known as cool ships, but if you, if you describe a cool ship in a, in a Belgian context, you're really describing something that you're, is meant to sour in this context, you're meant to cool it to the, to the ambient and then return it back to tank before, before it gets inoculated with bacteria.
Bobby Fleshman:So it's steaming.
Bobby Fleshman:On the rooftop as it's transitioning, yeah, it's about this tall, literally this tall and as big as the room we're in, so it's all this surface area and it's able to cool from about 210 all the way down to something like 140 and that's still in that pasteurization range and then you send that down to tank, so you've lost all that without, without spending any money on your energy bills.
Bobby Fleshman:And the steam, this is one version of how that name came about, but there's a whole book on that or two or, or a dozen, I'm sure.
Nicola Twilley:That's fascinating.
Nicola Twilley:And then the other thing that I heard is that because North Korea doesn't have a reliable refrigeration because their grid is you know, in such bad shape that steam beer is actually kind of the style that is big in North Korean breweries.
Nicola Twilley:We'll never get to try this.
Nicola Twilley:But this is what I've read
Nicola Twilley:. Bobby Fleshman: It's fascinating.
Allison McCoy:Well, and then the fascination of Maytag and his,
Bobby Fleshman:Which by the way, Anchor's still alive.
Bobby Fleshman:Yes.
Bobby Fleshman:On the, on the aside, I dunno if you guys heard this, but So Anchor was sold
Allison McCoy:Fritz Maytag owned Anchor Steam for the longest time.
Allison McCoy:Yeah.
Allison McCoy:Or Anchor Brewing Company.
Bobby Fleshman:They own the name Steam.
Bobby Fleshman:Nobody can use that.
Bobby Fleshman:the same
Allison McCoy:Maytag refrigeration slash appliance slash everything.
Allison McCoy:company.
Nicola Twilley:Amazing.
Bobby Fleshman:He sold, he sold every part of his company in '64, or his shares in the company in 64 to roll the dice on a decrepit brewery, which we know as Anchor.
Allison McCoy:So it turns out his family knew a lot about refrigeration.
Allison McCoy:So he was like, I'm going to go into the brewing industry then, because you know what?
Allison McCoy:One in the same.
Nicola Twilley:But I'll make it without refrigeration because
Bobby Fleshman:Crazy Wild West story in every sense.
Nicola Twilley:Yeah.
Nicola Twilley:That's amazing.
Nicola Twilley:The other thing that I think is really interesting about beer and sort of these pioneering things, it, it just kind of shows up at the start of everything.
Nicola Twilley:So it, the first, you know, one of the things I talk about in the book is how once we didn't know how old something was, cause it could have, could be any age if it's refrigerated it's, it's kind of the source of anxiety for folks.
Nicola Twilley:And it plays out with the invention of the sell by date.
Nicola Twilley:Manufacturers had to put on codes on their products to know When to rotate their inventory said they knew how old everything was and the public wanted to break those codes.
Nicola Twilley:There was a huge effort associated with like, okay.
Nicola Twilley:How old is our food really?
Nicola Twilley:Manufacturers didn't actually want anyone to know that obviously because it's kind of freaky, you know, really my apples ten months old I don't want to know that so they developed the sell by date or the best before date as a way to say, don't worry about how old it is.
Nicola Twilley:We'll worry about that.
Nicola Twilley:You just worry about how long it's good for.
Nicola Twilley:But supposedly it was a beer company that was the first date labeled food or beverage sold ever.
Nicola Twilley:It was Lucky Lager, brewed in San Francisco, and it was the first date labeled beer with a, with a best before date on it in the whole world.
Nicola Twilley:So beer's pioneering more ways than one.
Bobby Fleshman:And on one hand, it gives the consumer trust and they probably sold a lot of beer, but on the other hand, the day after that date, they had to be gone.
Nicola Twilley:And, and that's a, that's not a bad thing for a brewer because then they have to buy another one.
Bobby Fleshman:No, but you gotta, you gotta thread the needle.
Bobby Fleshman:That's for sure on the marketing and sales team too.
Gary Ardnt:When did the brewers move from using, just using refrigeration technology for ice to actually using it to just cool something directly that they just, you know, skip the ice step.
Nicola Twilley:I know that's a, like a, a breakthrough that.
Nicola Twilley:To us, doesn't even seem like a breakthrough, but must have just been one of those genius moments.
Nicola Twilley:to the best of my knowledge, it happens in the 1880s, actually in Germany.
Nicola Twilley:Using, brine coils to cool the storage cellar rather than the ice tanks in Dortmund, Germany.
Nicola Twilley:So again, a brewer.
Nicola Twilley:He was just like, Hey, I could cool the whole cellar.
Nicola Twilley:I don't, I don't have to make ice.
Nicola Twilley:I just cool the cellar.
Nicola Twilley:There's a lot of talk about how it changed the architecture of breweries.
Nicola Twilley:Cause they used to be like, almost like icebergs, more underground than at the top, you know, and suddenly they don't have to go underground.
Nicola Twilley:Cause you can cool at the surface.
Nicola Twilley:So there's a, you know, the whole kind of shape of a brewery and the flow.
Nicola Twilley:of, of how you make beer changes.
Bobby Fleshman:Yeah, brewers are like sled dogs.
Bobby Fleshman:they, they, once there's a market, they're going to go for it and they're going to figure it out and make it more efficiently, more efficient, more efficiently and make it better than the next guy.
Bobby Fleshman:But,
Allison McCoy:Well, our whole building is built around where the coolers are.
Allison McCoy:Because we do both loggers and ales and our cast condition ales are actually need to be a slightly warmer temperature.
Allison McCoy:And so right behind, we have this beautiful stained glass back bar and right behind that, immediately behind that is our large cooler for our loggers.
Allison McCoy:But then in the room that's next to it, we put some insulated walls and we cut a small hole in the main cooler and we have a little computer fan that like runs and just pulls just enough of the heat, well it cools it just enough so we can maintain two different temperatures.
Allison McCoy:We're simulating
Bobby Fleshman:the cellar conditions you might find in a pub in England.
Bobby Fleshman:But we built the
Allison McCoy:entire building around where the cool spaces were going to be.
Allison McCoy:It's at the, yeah, it's at the center of the operation, yeah.
Allison McCoy:Absolutely.
Allison McCoy:So here we
Bobby Fleshman:have a situation where we're letting the beer.
Bobby Fleshman:Actually mature and change, whereas the lager is meant to be preserved.
Nicola Twilley:It's so interesting what you're saying as well earlier.
Nicola Twilley:It goes back to what you're saying about how the reactions happen more slowly.
Nicola Twilley:There's been some work done on leftovers in the fridge and everyone knows that a curry is more delicious the next day.
Nicola Twilley:Why is this?
Nicola Twilley:And it's a sort of similar idea of if the flavor volatiles that have, you know, now dissolved in the oil can travel slowly and open up to kind of slowly in the fridge environment that you get that more rounded flavor.
Nicola Twilley:Again, this is something that I think needs more research, but there's, there's been some culinary research into like, why does that give you a better, more mellow.
Nicola Twilley:But a depth of flavor that you don't get just when you've just cooked it.
Nicola Twilley:And it's partly to do with that slow penetration, I think.
Bobby Fleshman:So we're going to have to get a flavor scientist on here next, Gary.
Bobby Fleshman:This is opening that.
Bobby Fleshman:No, I
Allison McCoy:was just going to, I was talking to my boss earlier about the direction of my research.
Allison McCoy:Maybe I'll take it away from like the lithium battery stuff that I do for the day job to actually be like, you know what?
Allison McCoy:No kids, we're going to.
Allison McCoy:We're going to study curries.
Allison McCoy:We're going to look at the chemical pathways of curries.
Allison McCoy:Like, okay, I like this investment.
Allison McCoy:This is
Gary Ardnt:There's no future in lithium batteries.
Allison McCoy:I know.
Allison McCoy:I know.
Nicola Twilley:I was going to say who needs, who needs lithium batteries?
Nicola Twilley:Definitely like tasty curry is where it's at.
Allison McCoy:Oh my God.
Nicola Twilley:Currys and beer.
Allison McCoy:That's what my new research stand for promotion with that.
Allison McCoy:Currys and beer.
Allison McCoy:Sounds great.
Gary Ardnt:Before we get too much further, I know Allison had brought this up.
Gary Ardnt:Why don't you tell us the story of Penny Pennington and her role in refrigeration technology?
Gary Ardnt:Because I know Alison's just kind of giddy.
Allison McCoy:She's just a badass.
Allison McCoy:Oh my God.
Allison McCoy:I'm so excited.
Nicola Twilley:She's a total rock star.
Nicola Twilley:So her full name was Mary, Mary Engle Pennington.
Nicola Twilley:But she went by Polly always.
Nicola Twilley:People knew her as Polly, except for if you met her doing government business, where you would meet her as Dr.
Nicola Twilley:M E Pennington and very carefully using the initials so that straight away people would walk in and ask to speak to Dr.
Nicola Twilley:Dr.
Nicola Twilley:Pennington, assuming that was a Mark or a Matthew and nope, it was a Mary, she was a lady, but her story is amazing.
Nicola Twilley:So she was born in Philly.
Nicola Twilley:at a very young age fell in love with chemistry.
Nicola Twilley:There's this amazing quote where she goes to a library and starts reading a chemistry textbook and has this, you know, she's like age 12, but she said she had this sudden sensation of an invisible world that became real to her when she was reading about chemistry and it just absolutely Fired her up and this is obviously an era where not a lot of women pursued further education and even fewer of them pursued it in chemistry, but she petitioned the University of Pennsylvania to let her study and she did.
Nicola Twilley:They let her in.
Nicola Twilley:At the end, they wouldn't give her a bachelor of science.
Nicola Twilley:They were like, actually, we can't do that.
Nicola Twilley:You're a woman.
Nicola Twilley:We'll give you a certificate of proficiency instead.
Nicola Twilley:So obnoxious.
Nicola Twilley:She carries on.
Nicola Twilley:She persists.
Nicola Twilley:She writes a PhD on refractory metals, so tantalum and niobium, the ones you can't wear down, like her, and then she graduates.
Nicola Twilley:Of course, the world is not lining up to hire a woman with a PhD in chemistry, like what's she going to do?
Nicola Twilley:So she bypasses this system that she has found to be very unhelpful and sets up her own lab and does tests for local doctors and hospitals, and, you know, runs their tests for them.
Nicola Twilley:And people found immediately she could get things done.
Nicola Twilley:She did her job well but she was also very persuasive and very kind of good at navigating challenging situations.
Nicola Twilley:And so the city of Philadelphia hired her to clean up its milk supply.
Nicola Twilley:And she It just was so much more.
Nicola Twilley:She didn't go out and tell people you have to boil everything.
Nicola Twilley:Okay, great.
Nicola Twilley:Done.
Nicola Twilley:She went out and she showed them what was growing on their equipment.
Nicola Twilley:And she showed them what it was doing to people.
Nicola Twilley:And she made it sort of a story that brought people along with her and she cleaned up the city's milk supply.
Nicola Twilley:It was a huge success.
Nicola Twilley:And that brought her to the attention of a guy called Harvey Washington Wiley, who had been really the guy who campaigned for the.
Nicola Twilley:first food safety regulation in the U.
Nicola Twilley:S.
Nicola Twilley:The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which remember I said how everyone was dying of gastrointestinal disorders?
Nicola Twilley:Yeah.
Nicola Twilley:So this is the, this is the moment where food has started to travel a long way and people are in cities getting their food from they don't know where, and it's killing them.
Nicola Twilley:So Harvey comes in , he's responsible for cleaning up the food supply.
Nicola Twilley:Among that is the refrigerated food supply, but he realizes, I don't know what the laws should say because I don't know if it's safe to refrigerate a chicken for two days, two weeks, two years.
Nicola Twilley:I don't know what temperature is the safe temperature.
Nicola Twilley:I don't know how quickly it has to get to that temperature because no one it was not known.
Nicola Twilley:We had figured out how to, to make a refrigerator, but not how to use refrigeration and so he hired Polly Pennington.
Nicola Twilley:He saw what she had done in Philadelphia.
Nicola Twilley:He said, this is the woman for the job because the federal government didn't have access to refrigerated warehouses.
Nicola Twilley:Industry had to want to cooperate and he was like, here's a woman who managed to make this, these, you know, ice cream vendors in the streets of Philadelphia, clean up their act just on pure persuasion.
Nicola Twilley:She's got what it takes.
Nicola Twilley:He entered her for the civil service exam without telling her that he had done it and then was just like, go sit that she was incredibly angry, but did it nonetheless.
Nicola Twilley:He entered her as Dr.
Nicola Twilley:M.
Nicola Twilley:E.
Nicola Twilley:Pennington because the civil service didn't hire women at the time and she got top marks and he hired her and decided to deal with, you know, the fact that she was a woman later and she got to work and she is the one who basically she did lab research.
Nicola Twilley:She did field research.
Nicola Twilley:She traveled around the country on a refrigerated rail cars, sampling like three chickens every 10 miles.
Nicola Twilley:She did a lot of visits and, and kind of talking with industry and solving their problems, making herself a trusted figure.
Nicola Twilley:And she is the one who basically made Americans trust refrigeration because she figured out how it needed to be done safely.
Nicola Twilley:She redesigned the refrigerated rail car, so it actually worked.
Nicola Twilley:She set the temperatures that everything had to be stored at.
Nicola Twilley:She came up with the rules and regulations for how long, you know what temperature and she made it so that our food was safe.
Nicola Twilley:You know, could be like refrigerated food was safe and by the time, you know, she was done.
Nicola Twilley:Just before the end of the late 30s, just before the start of the Second World War, American attitudes have flipped 180.
Nicola Twilley:Like they've gone from being afraid of refrigerated food, because how would people know it was fresh, to thinking if it wasn't refrigerated, It couldn't be fresh.
Nicola Twilley:And that 180 flip where you only trust refrigerated food to be safe, that's, that is Polly Pennington's legacy.
Nicola Twilley:I, so reading her book and, and I, I had never heard of her before.
Nicola Twilley:No one has.
Nicola Twilley:She's like this unsung hero.
Allison McCoy:I'm a chemistry PhD, I'm a chemistry professor, I, I, I mentor women in science all the time and I'm always looking like, I'm like, how has her name never crossed my, that is good.
Allison McCoy:Thank you.
Allison McCoy:Thank you for bringing her story to the world because she is a badass and I am so, so super excited to continue to advocate because yeah, I think, I think she is a, a lost name influential science of just, just good inquiry and good determination.
Allison McCoy:And I'm super excited that you brought her story back because, oh my gosh, she's amazing.
Nicola Twilley:She's amazing.
Nicola Twilley:And totally, like, it's so interesting to me that it was like, okay uh, it took brewers to invest and a lot of male scientists to figure out how to make a machine that was capable of producing cold, but no one could really use it effectively.
Nicola Twilley:Until we had done the science to figure that part out.
Nicola Twilley:And that's what Polly Pennington brought to the table.
Nicola Twilley:So it's a, it's like a key part of the whole story that just gets overlooked.
Allison McCoy:Not anymore.
Allison McCoy:Oh, I'm so excited.
Gary Ardnt:All right.
Gary Ardnt:Why don't we wrap things up Nicola, why don't you give one final plug for the book?
Gary Ardnt:Where can people find it?
Gary Ardnt:What are they going to find inside of it?
Allison McCoy:Oh yeah, it's called "Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves."
Allison McCoy:You can find it everywhere books are sold.
Allison McCoy:So your local independent bookstore is always a good place to go, bookshop.org the large retailer, of everything, if you wish, online too, it's for sale there.
Allison McCoy:I narrated the audio book.
Allison McCoy:So if you're an audio kind of person, that's available too.
Allison McCoy:Inside you will find much beer, but you will find much more including, why your salad bag is an advanced life extension machine.
Allison McCoy:How to know if you should date someone based on their fridge.
Allison McCoy:I mean, how to invest based on the fridge.
Allison McCoy:there's a lot of different things in there, including a lot of stories that people don't know, like the African American engineer who made refrigeration mobile.
Allison McCoy:And again, has been completely overlooked.
Allison McCoy:We wouldn't have truck refrigeration without him.
Allison McCoy:So, there's a lot of stories in there.
Allison McCoy:A lot of, you'll never look at your grocery store shelves the same way again.
Allison McCoy:And know, important information as well if you're dating.
Gary Ardnt:Thanks.
Gary Ardnt:I never thought of it that way.
Gary Ardnt:You could make a a swipe right or swipe left instead of like it's swipe hot, swipe cold.
Nicola Twilley:Oh, I don't know.
Nicola Twilley:Swipe hot, swipe cold.
Nicola Twilley:It almost writes itself.
Nicola Twilley:It almost writes itself.
Nicola Twilley:I love that.
Nicola Twilley:Alright, well
Bobby Fleshman:Thanks for teaching me the word frigorific.
Bobby Fleshman:I'm going to have to look this up.
Bobby Fleshman:I wrote that down at the beginning of this.
Nicola Twilley:Rigorific atoms.
Nicola Twilley:Isn't that great?
Nicola Twilley:I almost wish they did exist.
Nicola Twilley:I know thermodynamics wouldn't, it doesn't really allow for it, but I love them.
Allison McCoy:It would hate that.
Allison McCoy:Yeah.
Allison McCoy:Zero thaw is like nope, not going Thank you so much.
Allison McCoy:Yes, This has been so fun and thanks for doing, oh my gosh, the amount of research that went into this work.
Allison McCoy:I, that, this is incredible.
Allison McCoy:I definitely grab a copy because it's, it's, it's worth the read.
Allison McCoy:Page turner really is.
Nicola Twilley:But what I love is there's always more to learn, like from the brewing side, I didn't even know so much about this.
Nicola Twilley:So yeah, thank you so much for having me on.
Nicola Twilley:I knew this would be a fun conversation.
Nicola Twilley:I appreciate it.
Bobby Fleshman:Thanks, Nicky.
Gary Ardnt:Until next time, please make sure to check out our Patreon page or the Facebook group and always remember to respect your beer
