June 25th, Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream – Yum!

The rain came down, but thankfully the flood didn’t go up.  Last night it was the constant pitter patter of rain on the roof, which I admit I sort of like, as it puts me to sleep.  Today dawned windy, plenty of sunshine, and patchy clouds overhead.  A perfect day – if only I was fit enough to travel.  There may be some things worse than a back ache, yes, I know there are, but this is getting ridiculous.   I believe I know what brought this latest episode on, thus I will be a bit more careful in the future.  Ah well, in time I’m sure this too will pass.  Just have to hang in there a bit longer.

Today was spent just allowing myself to heal one more day. Tomorrow off to the chiropractor and then a couple of more days and I should be fit as a fiddle.  I know this, I’m not going to sit around and do nothing much longer.  There are maintenance items that need to be addressed and there are a number of places we still want to see before we leave here.

OK, let’s go back again to Friday and the last place that we visited that day.  Remember the old saying there is always room for ice cream?  So off we went to the world famous Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream Factory for a factory tour and hopefully some fun taste tasting.

This was the first sign that we were on the right track and almost there.

A quick turn into the driveway, up the hill, around the corner and there we where!  This is a picture of the factory minus, of course, lots of people.

So up the walkway to the factory and store itself.

And this is what it looked like the day we were there.  Oh yea, Friday, tourist season was in full swing!  We sort of forgot about that.

One of the first things that I noticed inside was this neat display of ice cream scoops.

But do you know who invented the ice cream scoop and why?  Here’s the scoop on this invention.  Alfred L. Cralle was an African American who worked as a porter at a drugstore and at a hotel. While working at the hotel, he developed the idea of the ice cream scoop.  It came to him when he noticed ice cream servers having difficulty trying to get the popular confection desired by the customer into the cone they were usually holding. The ice cream tended to stick to spoons and ladles, usually requiring the server to use two hands and at least two separate implements to serve customers.

Cralle responded to that problem by creating a mechanical device now known as the ice cream scoop. He applied for and received a patent on February 2, 1897. The thirty-year-old was granted U.S. Patent #576395.

Cralle’s invention, originally called an Ice Cream Mold and Disher, was designed to be able to keep ice cream and other foods from sticking. It was easy to operate with one hand. Since the Mold and Disher was strong and durable, effective, and inexpensive, it could be constructed in almost any desired shape, such as cone or a mound, with no delicate parts that could break or malfunction.  So now we all know.

Time now for the real reason for our visit – besides eating ice cream – the factory tour.

Tours start every 10 minutes and there were crowds waiting each and every time.  In due time it was our turn and off we went.  First, it was the Ben and Jerry’s Movie Theater to learn a bit about the company and how it got started.

We learned that It all started with a guy named Ben and a guy named Jerry. The year was 1978, and the guys decided they wanted to start a company. They briefly considered bagels, but the equipment was too expensive.  With a $5 correspondence course in ice cream-making from Penn State and a $12,000 investment ($4,000 of it borrowed) on May 15, 1978 the two guys opened an ice cream shop in a converted gas station in Vermont.

As the story goes, they only rented one bay and the office, the adjoining bay was occupied by a local farmer who sold his produce next to the guys selling ice cream.  I wonder who helped who in terms of bringing in the crowds?  Back then, the ice cream was made in a four-and-a-half gallon White Mountain rock-salt and ice freezer.   A far cry from how it is made today as we shall discover in a minute.  From those humble beginnings we learn that today Ben & Jerry’s products are distributed nationwide and around-the-globe in supermarkets, grocery stores, convenience stores, restaurants, cinemas and other ice-cream-friendly venues.

Next, we were taken for a through the window tour of the factory and an overview of how their ice cream is made.  We learned that it all starts, of course, with the cow. Not just one, but tens of thousands of them – from the hundreds of local farms that sell their raw milk to the St. Albans Cooperative Creamery in St. Albans, Vermont. At the Co-op , the milk is separated into heavy cream and condensed skim milk, then shipped by tanker truck to their St. Albans and Waterbury Vermont factories.

When the trucks arrive at the factory, the milk and cream are pumped into four

6,000-gallon storage silos, and kept cool at 36 degrees until they’re ready to convert them into Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and frozen yogurt.

Next is the blend tank. In the overall ice cream production scheme of things, making the mix is perhaps the most important part of the whole process. A very skilled and

experienced person known as the Mix Master performs mix-making procedures at the Blend Tank, a 1000-gallon stainless steel mega-blender. A batch of ice cream mix starts with heavy cream, condensed skim milk, and liquid cane sugar. To these ingredients the Mix Master also adds egg yolks, cocoa powder for the chocolate flavors, and natural stabilizers which help prevent heat shock and formation of ice crystals.

After ice cream mix is blended, it’s ready to be pasteurized and homogenized. Pasteurization is the process of heating the mix in order to kill harmful bacteria. The Pasteurizer is made up of a series of very thin stainless steel tubes and plates.

Hot water (182 degrees) flows on one side of the plates, and as cold mix (36 degrees)  is pumped through on the other side of the plates, heat from the hot water is transferred to the mix, heating it to 180 degrees.

Before the mix has a chance to cool down, it enters the Homogenizer. There, the mix is

forced under high pressure (about 2000 lbs. per square inch) through a very small opening so that the fat particles from the cream are so finely divided and emulsified that they do not separate from the rest of the mix.

The cooled mix is then pumped over to the Tank Room (a 36-degree room with six 5000-gallon mix storage tanks), where it’s held for 4 to 8 hours to allow the ingredients to intermingle (it’s kinda like simmering a sauce or allowing a fine wine to breathe).

Once the mix has “simmered,” it’s pumped from the Tank Room to the Flavor Vats: a  series of stainless steel vats that each hold 500 gallons of mix. It’s here that they add an

incredible range of flavorings, purees & extracts, like vanilla, pure peppermint, fruit extracts, banana puree, and even a few liqueurs from time to time.

Once the proper amount of flavoring is added, the mix is pumped to the Freezer. The freezers at the Waterbury plant uses liquid ammonia as a freezing agent (40 degrees below zero) and can freeze over 700 gallons of mix per hour.

Here’s how it works: the mix is pumped through a long, freezing cold cylinder known as the barrel. As the mix freezes to the wall of the barrel it is scraped away by revolving blades. When it gets to the front of the barrel it’s no longer mix – it’s ice cream!

After freezing the mix to a nice and creamy 22 degrees, it’s decision time –  if they’re just making chunkless flavors, like Vanilla or Chocolate, the ice cream is pumped directly to the pint-filling machinery, but if they’re making chunky flavors, the ice cream takes a turn through the Chunk Feeder.

Quite simply, the Chunk Feeder “feeds” chunks into the ice cream stream. Chunks are top-loaded into the Chunk Feeder hopper, at the bottom of which an auger regulates a steady chunk-flow into a star-wheel. As the star-wheel turns, it pushes the chunks into the stream of frozen ice cream flowing through the feeder. The be-chunked ice cream finally passes through a special blender attachment, which mixes the chunks throughout the stream of ice cream, ensuring an even ”chunk dispersal”.

After the chunks and the swirls are added,  the ice cream’s ready for dispensing into pint containers. This is done with a most amazing piece of machinery called the Automatic Filler. Not only does the Automatic Filler fill about 120 pints a minute, but it also performs pre-filling tasks, like dropping pint-cups two-by-two into perfect position so the filler-head can fill them.

In addition, after the cups are filled, the filler further facilitates them towards the lidder, which properly positions & pushes pint lids snugly on the cups.  Finally, a nifty pint-cup lifter frees the pints from the lidder, where a little lever waits to push them out and away on a conveyor belt to the next step in the process.

Before the packaged ice cream can be stored or shipped, it needs to be frozen further – from its semi-frozen temperature of 22 degrees above zero, to a fully-frozen-solid state of at least 10 degrees below zero. The process is called “hardening,” and it happens in the Spiral Hardener.

The actual temperature in the Spiral Hardening Tunnel is 30 degrees below zero, but huge fans blowing in the tunnel create a wind-chill temperature measuring 60 degrees below zero. In this totally polar environment, the pints travel up the slowly spiraling conveyor for three hours, and when they reach the top, their temperature has dropped from 22 degrees above zero (soft-serve consistency) to 10 degrees below zero (fully-frozen-solid consistency!)

After the pints are frozen solid they are wrapped for shipment.  First, an invertor flips every other pint upside down, and a freezer worker ensures that 8 pints (2 parallel rows of 4 pints, with every other pint inverted) are properly assembled to enter the Bundler

The Bundler is a heat-tunnel which shrink-wraps plastic around the bundle of 8 pints. The bundled 8-pack is called a “sleeve,” and each sleeve equals a gallon of ice cream. Freezer workers stack the sleeves on shipping pallets which are then stored in our 20-below-zero warehouse to await shipment.

Then it’s away it goes.  Ben & Jerry’s products are distributed nationwide and around-the-globe in supermarkets, grocery stores, convenience stores, restaurants, cinemas and other ice-cream-friendly venues.

One more stop in the tour and that was the taste tasting room.  Oh yea, this is the stop we all were waiting for.  I don’t believe a one of us was disappointed in the sample we received.  Absolutely delicious!

So that was how our day ended on Friday.  It was a wonderful day of travel and discovery and one we hope to repeat before the week is out.  Oh one silly fun fact, we discovered that the capital of Vermont which is Montpelier is the only state capital in the United States that does not and will not allow a McDonald’s franchise within city bounds.  Now how about that!

Though we’ve hit a small bump on the road of retirement in terms of my back, we know that this too shall pass.  Before long we’ll be out and about and enjoying the world that God has created and discovering new places and seeing new sights.

We hope that your week is off to a fantastic start and that you too are enjoying each day that God gives you to live.  A closing thought now for each of us to ponder:

As always,  if you are coming to the end of your day with concerns and worries, let me suggest that you turn them over to God.  After all, He is going to be up all night so why not let him handle them for you.

Time now for our evening prayers and eventually some shut-eye.  Till tomorrow.

These are the voyages of  Graybeard and it’s occupants, four paws and two humans.  Our continuing mission: to explore as many new states as possible, to seek out new acquaintances and make new friends, to boldly go where we have not been before