[00:00:04] Speaker A: Why do we drink what we do? Why do some drinks become classics while others languish at the back of the drinks cabinet?
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Is it just because we prefer those drinks? Or are there underlying economic, social or technological trends that shape our choices?
[00:00:19] Speaker A: And that's what we're going to explore on A Question of Drinks.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: Join us as we explore the hidden side of the drinks cabinet. The decisions, reversals, and underlying forces that shape the beverage market. I'm Luli Halstead.
[00:00:32] Speaker A: And I'm Felicity Carter. And together we host A Question of Drinks.
Luli, I've got a question for you. Why does a cold drink seem more refreshing than a hot one?
[00:00:45] Speaker B: Well, hello, Felicity. First up, but I'm guessing because it sends a cooling signal to our bodies, which I suppose we read as relief if we're thirsty or hot. Anyway, anyway, why asking Plistine what triggered the question?
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Because I'm sitting here in cool weather. I've been in Australia for three weeks and the first week I was here, all I did was enjoy the winter time.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: Okay. And so that's not something people typically think of of Australia, but of course you're in the southern hemisphere, so it's mid winter for you.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: That's right. So you've also been in the southern hemisphere.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I have, yes. Just back from Argentina yesterday, which was lovely, by the way, in case you were wondering.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: Of course I was wondering. What were you up to?
[00:01:32] Speaker B: Okay, so I was there. Well, first up, I was wearing a coat for the first time in a very long time, having sweltered like you in Europe over the past couple of months.
And then I was also out in Mendoza with Wines of Argentina, speaking at their conference. And then running my new course in Buenos Aires.
[00:01:50] Speaker A: Oh, that's a very unsubtle way of doing a plug, Luly. All right, tell us about your course.
[00:01:55] Speaker B: Okay. Not subtle at all. Yes, I'm plugging it.
So I was delivering the first two modules of my strategic wine marketing course. Anyway, anyway, so plug over and back to the episode. Do you want to introduce why we are talking all things cold drinks in this episode?
[00:02:12] Speaker A: So it's really what you mentioned it was because, you know, since late May, we've all been living through the recent European heat wave, you know, and, and I have to say, because I have to get this off my chest, people I spoke to outside Europe did not understand how bad it was. Because the thing about continental Europe is there's no relief anywhere. If you were in Germany like I was, you know, the only building that was mildly air conditioned was. Was the supermarket and everywhere else was either built to trap heat or, you know, like the pavements radiated it. So of course, I spent. I spent all the time from ancient July thinking about nothing but anything chilly.
[00:02:51] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. The London Underground, Felicity, it gone. My goodness me, it got stiflingly hot.
And you'll be pleased to know, so that ladies of a certain age, like me, who are using fans, so you can always tell who the old ladies are on the tube. Well, anyway, this has now been embraced by all genders and all age groups on the London Underground, so I don't feel like such an old lady on the tube anymore. But again, getting myself back on track.
I've got quite a lot to say about this and about the rise of refrigeration and how it created a whole new way of thinking about drinking. So the cold really being an ingredient in and of itself.
[00:03:32] Speaker A: Oh, that's an interesting observation. But before we get well.
[00:03:35] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: No, it is. Why don't we answer the question we started with? Why does a cold drink feel refreshing?
[00:03:43] Speaker B: Okay, so what do we mean by refreshing? Because it's one of those words, isn't it, that drinks companies use constantly and I'm not sure anybody really defines it.
[00:03:53] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I think in sort of normal parlance, outside the drink world, we'd say refreshing is the feeling of relief from heat, thirst or even physical discomfort, I suppose. And so the cold gives us lots of those signals at once.
[00:04:07] Speaker B: Yeah. So my understanding of this is that the cold receptors in our mouths detect the lower temperature and send a very rapid signal to our brain. And this then kind of creates an immediate sensation of cooling, really, before the drink possibly have changed our physical or overall body temperature.
[00:04:25] Speaker A: Oh, that's interesting. So it's the feeling of refreshment that happens pretty much straight away, not the actual refreshment.
[00:04:32] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. That's my understanding of it. Yeah.
[00:04:35] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, so you're really being tricked. I guess. And there's another interesting effect, which is when you're thirsty, your brain doesn't wait for the water you've drunk to hit your stomach before it starts to switch off thirst. Right. So when you get sensations in the mouth and throat that tell it that liquid is on the way, that's when the signals happen. And cold liquid seems to make that signal particularly satisfying, which I guess explains
[00:04:59] Speaker B: then why a cold drink can feel more thirst quenching than exactly the same drink served warm, even though, you know, they might contain the same liquid. The same water, for example.
[00:05:10] Speaker A: That's right. And then you get added sensory effects. So cold can suppress sweetness, bitterness and aroma, while carbonation adds tingling and acidity adds sharpness. So all of those together create that clean, crisp sensation that we associate with refreshment.
[00:05:25] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Which is interesting commercially, isn't it? Because refreshment isn't a flavor, then, it's an experience.
[00:05:32] Speaker A: Ah, good commercial insight there, Lily. I see what you did.
[00:05:34] Speaker B: Thank you. You see what I did? Which means that temperature then isn't simply about how we serve the product. It's part of, effectively, what the consumer is buying into.
[00:05:46] Speaker A: Yeah. Now this is where it gets really interesting, because for most of human history, creating that effect was really difficult because cold itself was scarce. Well, not cold, but, you know, turning cold into a commodity that could go into drinks was very difficult.
[00:06:01] Speaker B: Yeah. Which takes us back to ice and snow and extremely rich people, Felicity.
[00:06:06] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. So for most of human history, cold drinks were rare, seasonal and expensive. And I never thought about this ever, until a few years ago I went to Sicily and they showed us this cave where they used to store snow. So workers would collect snow from mountains and pack it with straw. And then in summer, they mixed the snow with fruit syrups to make a type of granita.
[00:06:27] Speaker B: Oh, that sounds very nice. But I suppose I don't automatically associate Sicily with snow. But now I'm thinking about it kind of makes sense because of the mountains.
So. Okay, on another minor. Am I allowed another minor tangent quickly? Of course you are.
[00:06:43] Speaker A: Of course you are relevant from Argentina. Go on a tangent.
[00:06:46] Speaker B: It's relevant. Ish. So the Andes mountains between Mendoza, where was. And Santiago, I can report back, are very snow covered at the moment. Not surprisingly, it's winter. But did you know that I. I didn't know this. A significant proportion of wine produced in Mendoza goes over the Andes by truck to get to the port on the Chile side. I hadn't appreciated that. So much wine went over the Mac and expensive.
[00:07:11] Speaker A: So now I'm imagining barrels of wine being hauled up by ropes or something romantic like that. Or by elephant, maybe?
[00:07:19] Speaker B: No, no, not quite. No. Definitely in trucks. But it's tough because there's basically one road and last week it opened after being shut, get this, for three, 34 days. So apparently there was a backlog of literally thousands of lorries, primarily on the Argentina side.
[00:07:36] Speaker A: Oh, God, that would be dire. That would be dire. All right, let's get back on track. But you know, we should talk about logistics in a future episode, because logistics also had a big role to play in how drinks were shaped so we should.
[00:07:49] Speaker B: We should, yeah, yeah. Snow, Snow. Take us back to snow.
[00:07:52] Speaker A: Okay, so believe it or not, they probably got the idea from the Arabs. And who thinks of the Middle east as a place full of ice? But for thousands of years, people like, for 2000 BC, people there collected and stored ice. So there were Persian ice houses called, and I'm going to try and pronounce this, I think it's yacht.
And they had some complicated system of collecting water and exposing it to the desert at nighttime when it's cold. So the heat radiated up from the water and then the water would freeze and then they used the ice for all kinds of drinks.
[00:08:23] Speaker B: So what you're saying is that historically cold drinks were something that needed effectively a lot of organization and therefore, I assume they were for rich people, basically a sign of wealth.
[00:08:36] Speaker A: Well, you know, it's interesting.
I'm not sure what history says about this. I'm sure if you were in Persia, everybody had the desert, so maybe you could make your own ice, I don't know. But basically you're right. So when I was researching this, I discovered that the person who was most associated with cold drinks in the ancient world was the Roman emperor Nero. So he did this thing where he would have water boiled, placed in a glass vessel and cooled in mountain snows. So the idea was to have all the coldness of snow without the potential contamination because of course people had stuck snow into drinks, but sometimes it could be dirty.
[00:09:09] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. So this is the guy who fiddled while kind of effectively Rome burned. And since Rome is a long way from the mountains, I'm imagining inevitably there were lots of slaves involved in all of this.
[00:09:22] Speaker A: You know, when Rome burned, he actually opened a fire relief fund he raised. So he got them always.
Okay. But yes, with his cold drinks he had people running back and forth from the Apennine Mountains. It was such an exciting, extravagant, labor intensive thing to do that his tutor, the philosopher Seneca was appalled and complained that rich people had found a way to put price on water, which was one of the few things that both rich and poor alike had a right to. Seneca also thought that it showed that Roman's stomachs were being ruined by overindulgence because people have got used to these cold drinks.
[00:09:57] Speaker B: Okay, another incoming one. Just a thought, as you're saying that we should do an episode on water. That's right, yeah. Because again, the impact. Anyway. But back to our friend Seneca. So that was very modern of him and can I say, rather brave the idea of complaining about an emperor. Did he End up facing consequences from that.
[00:10:16] Speaker A: Yes, but not for that.
It was his involvement in a plot to assassinate Nero that got him into trouble. So he was ordered to kill himself, which he did.
[00:10:28] Speaker B: Oh, okay, okay. So that didn't end well for him anyway.
[00:10:33] Speaker A: Nothing about Nero ended well.
[00:10:34] Speaker B: I don't know.
I wonder what he would have thought about frozen margaritas. I wonder if that's what they had. But I guess the serious point here is that cold drinks used to be a sign of. Of wealth and power. Especially if you're talking about in the summertime when it's warm and they had to be cooled by the snow they'd collected in the winter.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: Speaking of coming to a bad end, I have to tell you about one more thing. When.
[00:10:57] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:10:58] Speaker A: When Nero's regime collapsed and he fled Rome, he had to drink water from a dirty puddle.
[00:11:04] Speaker B: Oh, there's that same sort of, kind of fitting irony. It's. What's the German word? Schadenfreunder.
[00:11:12] Speaker A: Schadenfreude.
[00:11:12] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, schadenfreude. Yes, that sounds like that was going on. So what happened after Rome? Did the invaders take up chilled drinks with snow as a result of this?
[00:11:22] Speaker A: Well, I don't know if the barbarians made slaves run back and forth to the mountains, but it's certainly true that for centuries, courts and wealthy households, you know, used to build ice houses. So by the late 18th century, people even served shampoo, champagne, in an ice filled vessel, which obviously showed everybody how rich you were.
[00:11:40] Speaker B: Yeah, and I guess that's why champagne buckets are traditionally made of silver then, because it's all about of this sort of performance of wealth, isn't it? So tell me, does this have any relationship to modern serving temperatures, the connection.
[00:11:54] Speaker A: Oh, that's a really good question.
[00:11:57] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:11:58] Speaker A: Thank you.
And I don't have the definitive answer. I'm speculating, but I think you're probably right.
So I'm guessing that once elite drinkers associate specific wines with particular temperatures, that. That would become the convention.
[00:12:12] Speaker B: Yeah. Whereas it's kind of really a ritual about demonstrating taste and privilege, I guess we could say. So the wonderful French, you know, sociologists, are. Our often quoted friend, Pierre Bourdieu on this podcast, Friend of the show.
[00:12:27] Speaker A: Friend of the show.
[00:12:28] Speaker B: Friend of the show. I think he might have been, actually, I think he might have been had he been around. Anyway, he would have said that this was basically symbolic capital sort of turned into a material gesture effectively.
[00:12:41] Speaker A: All right, friend of the show or not, you have to explain that.
[00:12:45] Speaker B: Okay, so if you could chill champagne in a silver bucket is where I was trying to get to. You were signaling wealth and status, so turning economic capital into what he called social capital. So over time, as the practice spread, serving champagne cold stopped feeling like a sort of display of wealth and simply became sort of the mainstream, the right way to drink it. So Bourdieu called this habitus.
So when behaviors shaped by wealth and social status become the kind of the norm, and then we almost sort of forget, therefore, where they come from.
[00:13:20] Speaker A: So at the other end of society, where people were drinking beer, ordinary people were also storing ice and they were using coal cellars and cool rooms. And this is how we get the beer now known as lager.
[00:13:33] Speaker B: Okay. And it's because it's made in a cool room.
[00:13:36] Speaker A: Yeah. So it's made using yeast that work at lower temperatures than the traditional ale yeasts do. And then the beer is matured in cold storage. So the name lager comes from the German verb laagen, to store.
[00:13:49] Speaker B: I did not know that. I didn't know every day is a school day.
So for me, anyway. So did they do this all year, effectively, the cooler cellos, they mostly brewed
[00:14:00] Speaker A: it in cooler months and stored it in caves and cellars. If you did it during warmer weather, you'd have this very high risk of spoilage.
[00:14:08] Speaker B: So what happened if it was like a mild year, if you didn't get like the big freeze in winter?
[00:14:13] Speaker A: Well, if they hadn't stored ice, this was going to be a real problem.
[00:14:15] Speaker B: But.
[00:14:15] Speaker A: But this is Germany we're talking about. So German ingenuity to the rescue.
[00:14:20] Speaker B: Of course. Why am I not surprised?
[00:14:22] Speaker A: Very keen on getting the beer. Right, so, yes, the 1830s, there was an Austrian brewer, Anton Dreyer. Dreyer means to turn, by the way, who visited England.
Gabrielle Sidlemeyer of Munich's Spaden Brewery. And they studied British malting and brewing techniques. So in 1840, Drea released an amber coloured beer that became known as Vienna Lager.
[00:14:44] Speaker B: Okay, so do you, do you know, I. I thought I knew about beer. Clearly being the proud owner of my WSET Level 1 in Beer qualification.
[00:14:54] Speaker A: You are the beer expert on the
[00:14:55] Speaker B: podcast that suddenly makes it. Well, yes, but I haven't heard of Vienna Lager, so tell me about that.
[00:15:02] Speaker A: Okay, so. So the significant thing isn't the drink, because that fell out of fashion, but what's important is that he sold it throughout the Habsburg Empire.
He had to industrialize, so he bought breweries, he installed machineries, he brought raw material in bulk. And so this is the first time a drink may use a drink that used the coal became industrialized.
[00:15:24] Speaker B: Ah, okay, so he must. But did he have, therefore, a ceiling on growth? Because if he was relying on cold winters effectively turning up each year to enable this industrialization to happen.
[00:15:38] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. So. So, and this is the point. The real revolution is what happens when cold stops being something that is a natural product and it gets turned into an industrial commodity.
[00:15:49] Speaker B: Okay. But what we've already established is that cold drinks are still very much sort of exclusive and luxury. So tell us about what changed then.
[00:15:58] Speaker A: All right, so there's this guy. He's called the Ice King, and his name is Frederick Tudor of Boston.
[00:16:04] Speaker B: Okay. Both names, the Ice King and Frederick Tudor of Boston. Sam, like he's in a. Kind of a villain in a Bond movie or somebody in Game of Thrones or something.
[00:16:15] Speaker A: Yeah, he did end up in debtors prison. Right. But actually, he was an entrepreneur. So in 1806, he cut ice blocks from a pond in Massachusetts, which I think his father owned or it inherited, and he sent them to get this. Martinique. So the local newspaper is said to have joked that he shipped thousands of dollars worth of ice to a place where nobody needed it.
[00:16:36] Speaker B: But why wouldn't they need it, though? I think this sounds like a good idea because Martinique is the ideal place. You know, a hot Caribbean island.
Just in case you may have forgotten, Felicity, just a quick reminder. I was in the Caribbean earlier this year on my sabbatical and had lots of ice in my drinks, which was very much appreciated.
[00:16:54] Speaker A: Yes. And when you used to send me those pictures, thinking I'd be very envious, not realizing that I love ice and snow.
[00:17:01] Speaker B: Yes, I do.
[00:17:03] Speaker A: Where the snows are up to my ear. Yep. And I sent you a picture going, beat this. Okay, so. But the problem. Okay, so the problem in Martinique was all this ice turned up. Right. And nobody knew what to do with it. They didn't have anywhere that they could store it. So nearly all of it melted.
[00:17:18] Speaker B: Oh, that seems so sad. After all the effort of shipping all this ice. So he thought he'd spotted an unmet demand, but actually, he kind of had to construct the market around the product because it wasn't. Facilities weren't there.
[00:17:31] Speaker A: That's right. But actually, he had loads of good things going for him. So first of all, he had his pond that he'd inherited so he could get ice for free.
[00:17:38] Speaker B: Frozen pond is a good start, that frozen pond.
[00:17:40] Speaker A: That's right. But also, boats were leaving Boston empty so they could pick up cargo from the West Indies. Right. So they were.
So he could get the storage really cheaply and then on top of it, he packed the ice in sawdust, which was a worthless byproduct of the timber industry. Right. So the costs were minimal and eventually it worked. He eventually expanded across the world, including to the Caribbean, Hong Kong and India.
[00:18:04] Speaker B: Well, wasn't he entrepreneurial? But he was, so. But India. Didn't India already have a tradition of cold drinks at that point? Like I might mispronounce this, but the Shahbat, is it. Is that the drink I'm thinking of and punches and kind of like lime drinks? So the rich and powerful bought ice down from the Himalaya. So I suspect that what Tudor, our friend, was doing was really making my ice more affordable and everyday.
[00:18:33] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. That's exactly, exactly right. Yeah. He brought ice to people who otherwise couldn't send their runners up the mountains.
[00:18:41] Speaker B: Yeah. And typically what happens then is with repeated exposure, is that new things displace the old things. So we're moving into new habits effectively.
[00:18:50] Speaker A: Yeah, well, that's right. So eventually it was no longer socially acceptable to serve anybody warm punch, so they turned cold punch into the standard.
[00:18:58] Speaker B: Yeah. So basically availability then sort of creates the preference, doesn't it? So once people get used to something, the absence of it feels like a. Of unacceptable downgrade, which is very commercially powerful moment. Because the product is no longer seen as an indulgence, it becomes the everyday occurrence, as we were saying earlier.
[00:19:18] Speaker A: That's right. And so this whole infrastructure started to spring up around ice because as you imagine, I think in that part of the world there was a lot of ice they could go ice prospecting for. So by the 1860s, bartenders actually expected that they had it available. So there's a book called A Bartender's Guide written by Jerry Thomas, came out in 1862, telling readers how they should use shaved ice properly.
[00:19:44] Speaker B: Which means, I guess to the point we. We made right back at the beginning, which ice had stopped being about simply cooling the temperature of the drink, but became part of the recipe itself, effectively an ingredient into the cocktail.
[00:19:58] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. And of course, now ice isn't just ice anymore. The size and the shape of the cube actually match.
[00:20:06] Speaker B: It does, it does. Hugely. So I had an old fashioned in a bar in Buenos Aires on Saturday night and there was this really sort of spectacular, huge, perfectly rectangular block of ice. It was kind of almost like architectural in the past.
[00:20:22] Speaker A: I see. Let's just add this up, shall we? Buenos Aires cocktails. Spectacular designer ice. Yeah, just how hard were you working on this trip, Luli?
[00:20:32] Speaker B: I was working extremely hard, as you know, Felicity. I was always conducting important ethnographic field research.
[00:20:41] Speaker A: Of course you were. Though, though, though I have to come clean and say I was in San Francisco earlier this year and someone took me to the baseball and the bar there used ice cubes that were made to look like baseballs. They were pretty much the same size, too.
[00:20:54] Speaker B: That's really cool. I love that. But there is a. There is a serious point in this, isn't there? Which BART is. Bartenders choose different ice for different drinks. So, you know, small cubes and crushed ice have more surface area and melt, which is useful when you actually want dilution and rapid chilling. Whereas these kind of large cubes or your baseball spheres melt more slowly, which is why you see them in drinks like an old Fashioned, where you don't want the drink to become kind of watered down, but just chilled.
[00:21:25] Speaker A: So you just said, there's a serious point to this, and then you unleashed the most decadent thing that human civilization has ever done. I think there's a comet coming for us over just the ice cubes.
Though I will say I felt like there was just a. You know, there was just a bit too much baseball ice in my. In my Negroni. There was too little Negroni. The ratio wasn't quite right. But I guess what this conversation is revealing is that even the shape of coals has become part of the recipe.
[00:21:50] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But take this back to the snow. Cause we were talking about snow. There's still a natural limit, isn't there, to how much ice forms in the winter?
Yeah.
[00:22:00] Speaker A: Mind you, there must have been quite a lot in Boston if the guy was trucking it off to India and Hong Kong. But you're right. Now this is where Australia enters the picture.
[00:22:09] Speaker B: Well, if anyone needed to develop reliable coal things, I guess it would have been Australia would have been pretty handy.
[00:22:16] Speaker A: But.
[00:22:16] Speaker B: Pardon me, Felicity, though, I thought refrigeration was an American invention. Are you trying to claim it as an Australian?
[00:22:23] Speaker A: Oh, what a chauvinistic thing to say. You know, Australians also developed the black box. Lots of people know that, but it's true. Look, a lot of. A lot of scientists in places like England, Europe and America did try and develop cooling systems. And very early. There were some, you know, working on it in the mid, sort of 1700s. The problem was none of them could scale it up. So refrigeration just wasn't commercially viable. Now that all changed with a gentleman called James Harrison from Geelong in Victoria. And he was actually a printer and a newspaper owner, as well as being.
[00:22:56] Speaker B: Okay, so how does a printer invent refrigeration, though?
Potentially because he was motivated for a cold drink himself. But how did that. How did that come about?
[00:23:07] Speaker A: That's right. Everyone wanted a cold drink, so. No. So during the printing process, they actually used to clean type with ether, which evaporates, and when it evaporates, it produces a really cold effect on metal. So he noticed that, and so he experimented with vapor compression, and by the 1850s, he had machinery that could produce ice commercially, which is pretty amazing. So he was thinking about preserving fish. But breweries were very quick to see.
[00:23:35] Speaker B: Yeah. So suddenly the brewers aren't waiting around, hoping for that cold wind to the sn in the ice we were talking about.
[00:23:41] Speaker A: That's right. And you can imagine in Australia, you know, they're probably on it so fast, so. So other people developed the technology further, including someone called Carl von Linde in Munich. So by the 1890s, brewers no longer had to rely on the cold weather.
[00:23:55] Speaker B: Cold weather. Yeah, exactly. And it was inevitable once they needed to scale. So you need a reliable supply chain. And as we were saying, waiting for that cold winter definitely isn't a reliable one.
[00:24:07] Speaker A: Yeah. Can you imagine how. You can imagine how disappointed Frederick Tudor must have been? You know, there he is with his
[00:24:12] Speaker B: dad's pond and his ice blocks in the Caribbean.
[00:24:18] Speaker A: Okay. So the problem is, is that when you solve one problem, you often create another. So when you go back to Harrison, he had this huge plan that he was going to send Australian meat to Britain. In the United States. Well, it sounds sensible, but when.
Well, it could have worked, except they didn't load refrigeration machinery on board, so the meat warmed up somewhere in tropics through an overboard.
[00:24:41] Speaker B: That's definitely what you call a channel management issue.
And the more pro, I guess, the. The more complicated the product, the more vulnerable that a supply chain effectively becomes.
[00:24:54] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right, that's right. But eventually you get it right and then the market.
[00:24:58] Speaker B: Yeah. And critically, it also means you can develop strong branding. Felicity.
[00:25:03] Speaker A: Yay.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: I've got branding in. So, as we know, a brand is a promise of quality and style, and it' much harder to deliver that if the liquid varies wildly because, you know, February was cold and March was hot or whatever it is.
[00:25:18] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. And. And so once you can industrialize, you can maintain a regular supply and buyers know they can rely on you.
[00:25:26] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And this was the period wasn't it when Louis Pasteur was investigating why wine and beer spoiled. So. So how did pasteurization then intersect with refrigeration?
[00:25:42] Speaker A: Well, actually, that's a really good insight. I hadn't thought about that, but. So there were many things happening at once which were, you know, rapidly improving quality. I guess the difference is that pasteurization uses heat to kill microbes, while cooling slows the biological and chemical activity. So if you put those two together, you've now got a period where you have way more control over fermentation. And.
[00:26:02] Speaker B: Yeah, so now we get to the really interesting bit, which is how all this technology changed the drinks themselves and particularly the occasions at which people were drinking them.
[00:26:15] Speaker A: So one big change, as always happens with industrialization, is things become uniform. So local beer once reflected the place it came from and the seasons where, with industrial techniques, drinks now become cleaner and more stable and they become more uniform and predictable.
[00:26:31] Speaker B: I would argue that uniformity is a virtue.
Consumers want to know what they're getting and eventually every beer tastes different, depending on the weather. That's going to be hard for a brewery to build. Kind of consumer customer loyalty.
[00:26:46] Speaker A: Unless he knows all the neighbours personally, which probably a lot of.
[00:26:49] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, but we're not. We're not getting to scale that way, are we?
But it's interesting to think about this in the context of wine, because once you introduce cooling technology, winemakers can't control the production much more easily. Can't, aren't they?
[00:27:07] Speaker A: Yes, that's right. And so cold stabilization preserves aromas in particular, and also it can manage yeast activity, which is also important in preventing.
[00:27:15] Speaker B: Yeah. Which, in other words, winemakers can now produce clean and aromatic and fresh dolls of wine consistently year after year.
[00:27:25] Speaker A: Yes. And now we come to a key argument in the world of wine. So a lot of wine geeks really dislike commercial wines, specifically because they're made to a recipe and they always taste the same regardless vintage. And that's very much a feature of.
[00:27:39] Speaker B: Okay, rant incoming. Okay, I with. I get really frustrated, Felicity, when wine people use the word commercial effectively as an insult. If we're a wine business, surely selling wine is actually the whole point of the business. That's fundamental. So why this kind of derogatory use of the word commercial? I don't know. That's my rant. Rant over.
[00:28:04] Speaker A: Yes. And then we get to natural wine
[00:28:05] Speaker B: Lily, which, as you know, is another rant entirely. So let's not derail the episode. And back to chilled. Let's take us back to chilled off rants. It's true that chilling a wine changes the sensory experience?
[00:28:20] Speaker A: Yes, that's right. So if it's too cold, you suppress the flavour. So as the drink gets colder, the wine releases fewer aroma compounds, and also perceptions of things like sweetness, bitterness and acidity get blunted.
[00:28:32] Speaker B: Yeah, which is why very cold serving something very cold can make a simple drink seem sort of cleaner and. And more refreshing than maybe it is, you know, in reality.
[00:28:43] Speaker A: And so then you get beer companies, you know, using extra cold as a selling tool. All right, this is your area. Luli, do you want to go into the question of how coldness becomes a selling point?
[00:28:54] Speaker B: Well, thank you, Felicity. I will. Yes. So the credit has to go to the Coca Cola Company. So, created in Atlanta in 1886 and sold at soda fountains, where it was mixed basically at the time of order. And the company sold it early on as, you know, positioning it as delicious and refreshing because the product was served cold.
[00:29:15] Speaker A: So it didn't come in a bottle, then?
[00:29:17] Speaker B: No. No effect. It was the sort of soda fountains is where it started. Eventually it did, though, so. But Coca Cola had a problem.
They couldn't be sure that everyone selling it would chill it properly or serve it in a way that was consistent with the brand.
So the syrup came in a barrel, and the people set selling it, the final product would basically saw the syrup barrels in half, attach legs, and fill them with ice and water. And mostly it worked, but, of course, sometimes it didn't.
[00:29:46] Speaker A: Okay, so this sounds like a classic distribution problem, particularly in wine. So winemakers typically, or, you know, traditionally always assume that their responsibility ended at the farm gate.
[00:29:56] Speaker B: Indeed. But consumers consider that everything that happens is part of the brand, from how easily it is to find it to what condition it's in when they finally get to consume it. So if the drink or bottle was lukewarm or not kind of displayed properly, Coca Cola's branding, therefore, would have suffered.
[00:30:15] Speaker A: So how did they solve the problem? Did they. Did they go around offering Coca Cola mixing education?
[00:30:21] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, if they'd been a wine company, that's probably what they would have done. They'd have treated sort of cooling equipment as an integral part of their branding. But company president Robert Woodruff also wanted that to be standardized. So we were talking about standardization through industrialization earlier, particularly for the branding. So he established a technical department in 1929, and the company introduced the Glasscock cooler and sold it for $12.
[00:30:49] Speaker A: Okay, so can you give some context? Is that cheap or expensive at the time?
[00:30:53] Speaker B: Okay, I'm glad you asked that, because I actually did look that up. So the average worker at the time was earning around $25 a week. So it was about half a week's salary.
So not something that most people could buy automatically for their household.
But it was extremely cheap for a business effectively to buy, as the alternative coolers at the time were more like around $150. No.
[00:31:17] Speaker A: Okay. So I guess. And also, I guess the other virtue is that it's branded. So even if people weren't buying Coke, they were still seeing this cooler with a brand on it standing in the corner.
[00:31:27] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it made people think about cold and drinks and sort of associating that from a brand positioning point of view with Coca Cola, so they realized was a huge selling point for them. So they later in their advertising, you start to see sort of ice and condensation and bubbles and so on through the sort of graphics in their advertising. They're really playing this up.
[00:31:53] Speaker A: All right, so to summarize, this has gone from cold drinks being extremely elite and precious to being front and center and anyone can go and buy it.
[00:32:04] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And that's right. So Coca Cola basically turned cold into everyday drinks and that were reliant, viable and widely available. And it became, as we were saying earlier, the expectation. So rather than sort of super special.
Yeah.
[00:32:18] Speaker A: So just thinking about it, I mean, I'm sure $12 was quite, you know, cheap for a business, but if Coke could distribute something that cheap, I'm guessing that being able to chill things was probably also spreading in other ways through the culture.
[00:32:30] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And that's also part of the story. So General Electric introduced its monitor top refrigeration in sort of around 1927, which was. Was one of the first models to become sort of widely popular. So suddenly now we have households who could keep bottles cold without waiting for somebody to deliver a block of ice to their house.
[00:32:53] Speaker A: This is the dawn of the baseball ice era, I guess.
[00:32:57] Speaker B: Yes, yes.
[00:32:58] Speaker A: Could they have predicted where this was going to go?
[00:33:01] Speaker B: Well, potentially, yes, because the refrigerator. The refrigerator, sorry, meant that the development of. Of trays and freezer compartments. So now you've got ice cubes that suddenly are available to all of us, not our, just our bartenders.
[00:33:16] Speaker A: Okay, so do you think that the rise of cold drinks was an inevitability? You know, even if Coca Cola hadn't been around, maybe this was. This. This was going to happen anyway.
[00:33:25] Speaker B: Yeah, probably, absolutely. But maybe the process would have been slower. So what Coke did was make the cold drink very visible and very available and Connected to brands.
Oh, I' proud of you. Well done. Yes, yes, because it was about the advertising, the need, not the recipe. So basically the advertising then wasn't talking about the flavor of the product, the intrinsic product cues, but it was talking about the occasion. So its slogans and its advertising at the time attached the brand to things like thirst and heat and tiredness and the desire for a break. So they had kind of taglines like delicious and refreshing or Coca Cola revives and sustains, which they used in 1905. Enjoy thirst in 1923. So basically all these ideas about refreshment and coolness was very much coming through their marketing communications.
[00:34:24] Speaker A: They were doing category entry points.
[00:34:26] Speaker B: Oh, you're on a roll today, Felicity.
Yes, yes. So it advertised the situation when somebody might think about buying a drink. Category entry points, as you said, which of course opened the door for other drinks to do similar things.
[00:34:42] Speaker A: However, and we forgot the. The third leg on the trilogy, which is the distinctive assets, the red color. Oh, yes, I guess. So is there anything?
[00:34:53] Speaker B: Well, we had convenience as well. So Cope wanted to enter the at home occasion. So we're talking about occasions and category entry points and not just be present in the kind of soda parlors, which is where they, they originally started. So in 1923 they introduced a six pack carrier, so you could basically take it to parties and store it at home. Then later there are other developments like the automatic chilled vending machine.
[00:35:19] Speaker A: Oh, right. So like champagne going into vending machines and parties.
[00:35:24] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So the reason Moet Hennessey does the same thing is that a drink that's cold and within arm's reach has a real huge advantage over any other drink that's harder to get hold of.
[00:35:38] Speaker A: Yeah, and I guess the fact that Coke was everywhere was important too.
[00:35:42] Speaker B: Yeah, and crucially, the fact it was cold was integral to success. So eventually a warm bottle, as we were saying earlier, starts to feel wrong. And that's a huge commercial advantage. If your bottle isn't in a cooler somewhere, it won't feel right. So now the serving condition is part of the product itself.
[00:35:59] Speaker A: Well, you know, that's exactly the same with beer. And this is why it's a cultural flashpoint. So in Australia, the beer has to be cold and there's a lot of scoffers laughing at Brits who drink warmer beer.
[00:36:10] Speaker B: Yes, well, which is partly where we get pale ale in India and why we drink it at room temperature. But let's not get into the politics on that one right now because I lose somebody who's got a WSET level one in beer.
Exactly. But it is why extra cold? As part of the branding work, it assumes cool temperature is sort of integral in the product. And if it offers a more extreme version, like Ultra Extra, it therefore becomes more of the sort of prized experience. And actually that's very simple to communicate, isn't it, this notion of extra cold.
[00:36:50] Speaker A: Whereas, of course, the irony in all of this is that the colder the drink, the more difficult it is to perceive any aromas and flavours.
[00:36:56] Speaker B: Yeah. Which I guess proves the point I always bang on about, as we know, which is people think that the flavor itself, often in drinks, is the selling point, whereas it isn't. It's about that product market fit and the occasion. Occasion suitability.
[00:37:13] Speaker A: Sometimes people do want complexity.
[00:37:16] Speaker B: Yeah, they do. But if we're in the, what, commercial end of the market, it might be more about consistency.
[00:37:26] Speaker A: All right. Yeah, but.
So let's go back to Coke and refrigerators, because a safer topic. All right. The new refrigerators, I'm guessing that the new technology must have been. Been either a forerunner or in itself kicked off a wave of innovation. So in drinks. Right, so. So now that you can refrigerate, I'm thinking about the obvious things like slushies.
Slushies.
[00:37:48] Speaker B: Oh, blue, your favorite color drink.
[00:37:51] Speaker A: It's everybody's favorite color. It makes your tongue go blue.
[00:37:54] Speaker B: Oh, it's not, Felicity. It's so not. I was. Okay. I was thinking of coffee, actually, when you said that. Okay. Because nobody abandoned kind of hot coffee once iced coffee became available.
Instead, what' happened is we've really kind of expanded the number of occasions for where coffee now becomes or feels appropriate.
[00:38:16] Speaker A: Oh, I guess that's true for tea and iced tea as well.
[00:38:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:38:20] Speaker A: So. So formerly hot drinks can now compete with drinks that were once lukewarm or cold.
[00:38:26] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think there's a bigger commercial point here, isn't there? Because refreshment has become the sort of dominant idea in drinks, hasn't it?
[00:38:34] Speaker A: Yeah. Though I'm guessing drinks companies would call it a trinned.
[00:38:38] Speaker B: Yes, yes, they probably would.
But look, but look what's happening in wine. So let's take that as an example, because we're seeing consumers move away from red wine towards white, rose and sparkling as styles that are traditionally served cold and more feel, therefore more refreshing. And when you've got the sort of extraordinary growth that we've seen in canned RTDs ready to drinks alongside that, which are portioned and portable and again, designed to be drunk, chilled.
[00:39:11] Speaker A: Yeah, we haven't we haven't mentioned it. But of course the backdrop to this is the warming weather. But.
[00:39:16] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:39:16] Speaker A: So what you're saying is that some of the big category shifts we're seeing aren't necessarily just about flavour or even the liquid itself.
[00:39:24] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And we tend to explain them by saying consumers suddenly prefer Sauvignon Blanc to Cabernet or cocktails in a can. But perhaps part of what they're choosing is this idea of refreshment that we talked about at the beginning. So sort of cold Im easy products that fit the occasion with this chilling, sort of sensory, you know, FL profile happening.
[00:39:52] Speaker A: Yeah. And of course, like I just said, it's particularly appropriate if summers keep getting hotter.
[00:39:58] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Which makes temperature a much bigger commercial question than simply, you know, so what temperature should I serve this at?
Yeah.
[00:40:07] Speaker A: Which makes me wonder, how many drinks do we actually drink at room temperature? Temperature now?
[00:40:12] Speaker B: Gosh, that's. Yeah, not actually, not that many. Do we. So if we think about it. Well, some, some English beers are sold at more. More at room temperature. But, but most beers and wine and rose. And actually most drinks are solved cold, served cold, aren't they?
Coffee and teas are. Yeah, exactly, Coffee and tea. But you don't really get this sort of in between, I guess, is what I'm now thinking as. As you're asking the question. So room tem.
Quite an unusual serving temperature.
[00:40:45] Speaker A: Yeah. And we would have said, if we did this podcast 10 years ago, we would have said red wine was the obvious exception. But of course now people are chilling reds as well.
[00:40:54] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Which is the idea of, as you say, which of room temperature for red is slightly misleading because historically that meant a cooler temperature than, well, certainly than our centrally, you know, heated homes today.
[00:41:11] Speaker A: Yeah. So maybe the strange thing isn't that we like cold drinks, it's that we've ended up with this very narrow group of drinks that we still expect not to be cold, if you know what I mean.
[00:41:21] Speaker B: Yeah. It's almost the reverse.
[00:41:23] Speaker A: We've narrowed our range of temperatures we tolerate. It's interesting.
[00:41:26] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And if refreshment becomes more important, particularly as the summers get hotter, that's potentially another challenge, isn't it, for red wine if we're, you know, still going to serve Ryan. Red wine more at room temperature. But you could say an. An opportunity, therefore, for us getting more comfortable with chilling red wine.
[00:41:46] Speaker A: All right, I've got a question for you. A Pierre Bordeaux question. So culture used to be a sign of extreme wealth and then they signaled Modernity, hygiene, and mass availability.
So, Lily, what do they signal now?
[00:42:01] Speaker B: I would say immediacy. So you can drink whatever it is straight away, whether it's coffee or an RTD or whatever it is. So that idea of immediacy, chilled immediacy.
[00:42:15] Speaker A: Yeah, it's true. I mean, going back to red wine back in the day, it involved a set of rituals. You had to open the bottle, then you had to decant it, you had to let it breathe, and then you had to pour it into the right glasses. And now you can just pop the screw top on a refreshing white wine and drink it straight away. Okay, so here's another question. What do we lose when we lose the ritual?
[00:42:37] Speaker B: Again, I would go back to occasion. I think. So sometimes ritual enhances the occasion, and other times it can feel intimidating. So making a bottle of chilled wine, for example, easier to enjoy on a hot day, I guess, therefore makes it more approachable.
[00:42:55] Speaker A: Yeah. So you don't want to remove all the ritual and friction from everything, because otherwise all you have is a drink that just is competing with other cold drinks. But I guess what you're saying is case by case.
[00:43:06] Speaker B: Yeah, ye. Exactly, exactly. Case by. And going back to Coke. If we kind of go back there again, their lesson wasn't simply stick it in the refrigerator, but they had understood the experience. You know, the. How do we make this experience and make sure we have the system, I. E. Refrigeration, to deliver on that.
[00:43:28] Speaker A: All right, I've got one final question for you.
Did refrigeration satisfy an existing desire, or did it create a whole new one?
[00:43:38] Speaker B: Okay, that's a hard question, Felicity. And I. I will do my normal annoying both ism on that. So I always swiggle out of this one, don't I? So you don't need a marketing department to decide that jumping into cold water is the antidote. Antidote to heat. But industry may cold things into something reliable and visible and repeatable. So they turned an old pleasure into effect.
A preference, we could say.
So maybe the lesson. So I'll try and answer it better. Maybe the lesson from 200 years of refrigeration is that temperature doesn't just change how a drink tastes. It changes where it can compete. And as the world gets hotter, that may matter even more.
[00:44:27] Speaker A: Yes. And then it turns into an expectation. And plus, refrigeration expanded the range of drinks that were actually. Actually available.
[00:44:34] Speaker B: Yeah. So there's a sort of virtuous circle, isn't there? So it means that even when there's a heat Wave. We can still have something cold on hand.
[00:44:42] Speaker A: Or if you're recording a podcast at the tail end of a Southern hemisphere winter, you can go traditional and have something hot.
[00:44:51] Speaker B: So does all this mean I can now proudly ask for ice in my white wine, particularly when I'm on a plane, which is, you know, I mentioned in a previous podcast and now with no shame.
[00:45:05] Speaker A: So.
[00:45:05] Speaker B: So, Felicity, actually, I was asked on the plane I was on yesterday if I wanted Albarino with ice on my flight home yesterday.
[00:45:14] Speaker A: So they asked. They asked you?
[00:45:15] Speaker B: Yes, they did.
[00:45:17] Speaker A: Oh, that's interesting.
Okay, so that tells me what part of the plane that you were flying in. All right, so now we've got. We've got Buenos Aires cocktail bars, people who ask you if you want ice in your drink. We've got spectacular designer ice, Al Perinho on the plane. I think what we've learned is less about refrigeration and more about your lifestyle style. Luly.
[00:45:38] Speaker B: Oh, as ever, Felicity, all done in the name of research.
[00:45:42] Speaker A: Okay, so you have done great research for our question of why cold drinks are considered refreshing.
[00:45:48] Speaker B: And if you've got a drinks question you want us to research, drop us a
[email protected] or just write and send us compliments.
[00:46:00] Speaker A: You can do that, too.
[00:46:01] Speaker B: Yeah, that would be very nice.
You've been listening to A Question of Drinks, the podcast that explores why we drink, what we do, and we're here
[00:46:13] Speaker A: to answer your questions. If you want to know more about anything drinks, from the marketing history to the economic underpinnings to why this drink is popular and not that one, send
[00:46:22] Speaker B: us an email, send us any questions you'd like us to discuss. And quite frankly, the most more random niche the better. And we'll have a go at answering them. We can be reached on a question of drinksmail.com that's a question of drinks or one wordmail.com and we would hugely
[00:46:41] Speaker A: appreciate you reviewing and rating this podcast before you go. Five stars are much appreciated.
